During the last decade Eric Owen Moss built a critical fortune with a series of elaborations of the de-constructivist theories of the 1990s. Considered one of the most innovative North American architects working today, Eric Owen Moss is known for reinventing spaces for commercial uses and performing arts facilities. Moss plans have breathed new life into marginal urban Los Angeles areas such as his celebrated sequence of buildings in Culver City's Hayden Tract.This monograph features 250 illustrations-including the Wedgewood Holly Complex, the Beehive and the Box. Eric Owen Moss opened his office in Los Angeles in 1973. In addition to practicing, he has held professorial chairs at Yale, Harvard, and his current position is at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

The definitive statement of Eric Owen Moss's design theory, Gnostic Architecture seeks to expand the discussion of contemporary architecture beyond debates over style or ideology. It does so, however, not by turning to conventional site analysis or fashionable intellectual trends for support but by emphasizing the architect's personal approach to the act of building. "Gnostic architecture," Moss says, "is not about faith in a movement, a methodology, a process, a technique, or technology. It is a strategy for keeping architecture in a perpetual state of motion." While Moss's gnostic approach keeps the practice of architecture on the move, it nevertheless focuses on fundamental questions that face all architects, questions that, as he says, separate architects from those who just happen to do architecture. Gnosticism allows the architect to ignore the contradictions and confusions encountered along the path that is the practice of architecture, so that he or she may rely on individual, internally derived design methods. The measure of an architect's integrity is thus dependent on his or her own internal compass and not on external factors. The book, with its unique, trapezoidal shape and suggestive visual character, gives uncanny material expression to Moss's gnosticism.

Offers a unique look into the mind and method of one of the most important architects working today. For nearly three decades, Eric Owen Moss Architects has been at work transforming the former industrial area of the Hayden Tract in Culver City, California into one of the most highly concentrated centers of architectural experimentation in the world. This book looks into the mind and method of one of the most important architects working today through a presentation of three schemes designed for a single site in the Hayden Tract since 1991

The Lawson-Westen House was designed for a couple who cook together and entertain frequently. The vertical funnel of space above the food preparation area that results, is a dominant form in the building's composition and one of the major ordering devices in the building's circulation system. It is also an extraordinarily complex geometric feat, relying on shifting grids and subtle subdivisions, revealing a geometrically-based order of Moss' own devising. Incomprehensible at a simple glance, the interior of the Lawson-Western House is exhilarating and mentally exhausting at the same time.

Take a theoretical approach to architecture with The Autopoiesis of Architecture, which presents the topic as a discipline with its own unique logic. Architecture's conception of itself is addressed as well as its development within wider contemporary society. Author Patrik Schumacher offers innovative treatment that enriches architectural theory with a coordinated arsenal of concepts facilitating both detailed analysis and insightful comparisons with other domains, such as art, science and politics. He explores how the various modes of communication comprising architecture depend upon each other, combine, and form a unique subsystem of society that co-evolves with other important autopoietic subsystems like art, science, politics and the economy. The first of two volumes that together present a comprehensive account of architecture's autopoiesis, this book elaborates the theory of architecture?s autopoeisis in 8 parts, 50 sections and 200 chapters. Each of the 50 sections poses a thesis drawing a central message from the insights articulated within the respective section. The 200 chapters are gathering and sorting the accumulated intelligence of the discipline according to the new conceptual framework adopted, in order to catalyze and elaborate the new formulations and insights that are then encapsulated in the theses. However, while the theoretical work in the text of the chapters relies on the rigorous build up of a new theoretical language, the theses are written in ordinary language ? with the theoretical concepts placed in brackets. The full list of the 50 theses affords a convenient summary printed as appendix at the end of the book. The second volume completes the analysis of the discourse and further proposes a new agenda for contemporary architecture in response to the challenges and opportunities that confront architectural design within the context of current societal and technological developments.

Robotics is the fastest-growing and most exciting area of development in architecture and architectural education for a generation, offering new paradigms for design and fabrication. Schools and practices around the world are engaging robotics and this publication offers new insights into the full design potential of their application. Robot House features projects produced by one of the most innovative robotics design studios in the world, often interacting with a wide range of technologies from motion capture to material science - a realm far beyond conventional 3D modeling and the capabilities of 3D printing. The book has three central sections: Techniques, which sets out the fields and the thinking that underlie the new uses for robotics; Projects, which offers detailed presentations that explore how these principles can be applied and augmented through interactive prototypes and working models; and Platforms, which presents the working tools for used for this new genre of improvisational robotics through specially drawn technical illustrations. The introduction frames the current developments in the history of architectural innovation, and the reference section includes a glossary and diagrams.

Description: The Nanjing Charter is a statement of principles and practices for urbanism for "one person at a time" designed by "one architect at a time." This Charter is a riposte to the Athens Charter of 1933, which laid down the law for the modernist city. In a remarkable series of drawings for a four-part city in China, Moss tests the line between theory and practice with provocative results. Embracing this ambiguity, a number of "experts" in urban design, history, and theory provide commentary, arguing with Moss-and one another-about the meaning of this splendidly elusive work.

This book offers a casual, witty, and approachable retrospective on the characters, environment, and cultural history of L.A. architecture as remembered through a series of oral history interviews with the architects conducted by Stephen Phillips alongside Wim de Wit, Christopher Alexander, and the students of the Cal Poly L.A. Metro Program in Architecture and Urban Design.

Examines the influence of twentieth-century avant-garde movements on the contemporary architectural landscape through the work of “disruptors” such as Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid. With an irregular format designed by celebrated graphic designer Abbott Miller of Pentagram. In Architecture Unbound, noted architecture critic Joseph Giovannini proposes that our current architectural landscape ultimately emerged from transgressive and progressive art movements that had roiled Europe before and after World War I. By the 1960s, social unrest and cultural disruption opened the way for investigations into an inventive, antiauthoritarian architecture. Explorations emerged in the 1970s, and built projects surfaced in the 1980s, taking digital form in the 1990s, with large-scale projects finally landing on the far side of the millennium. Architecture Unbound traces all of these developments and influences, presenting an authoritative and illuminating history not only of the sources of contemporary currents in architecture but also of the twentieth-century avant-garde and the twenty-first-century digital revolution in form-making, and profiling the most influential practitioners and their most notable projects, including Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall, Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House, Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the World Trade Center, Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Tower, and Herzog and de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing.