After Hernán Díaz Alonso’s introduction, and an audio clip of thunder, Eric Owen Moss interrogates the chasing of meanings in contemporary architecture. The absence of shared narratives compels architects to invent their own, raising questions about what endures, what’s ephemeral, to what extent are we beholden to external authority, and to what extent free? What, for that matter, constitutes seriousness in architecture? Humor? How long do program’s endure?

Moss shows a continuously scrolling line of experiments and sketches with forms and materials, which is followed by a scrolling line of images from various buildings by Moss. He asks if they aren’t actually one building, one project.

[Please note: Between 24:56 and 29:17, the audio drops out due to YouTube forbidding the use of the music from Philip Glass’s “Glassworks” that originally accompanied this section.]

Moss describes buildings as simultaneously part of local, national, and international conversations.

He discusses in detail several projects in post-industrial sites previously considered undesirable in Culver City, including
•Glass Forest (2009-current) retail complex with restaurants and parking
•A project to agglomerate several buildings from the 1990s (Lindblade Tower, Paramount Laundry, Gary Group, Metafor) into a bigger whole
•Turtle commercial tower
•Trajan’s tower media center
•(W)rapper 2
•(W)rapper 1 (1997-2023)

At 1:02:21, Moss talks with Díaz Alonso about a range of topics raised by his lecture, including methodology, contradictions, reason versus emotion, provocation, and being open to what’s left out.