Sylvia Lavin asks Eric Owen Moss to describe why he became an architect, his education, and the start of his practice. They debate how architectural practice was structured in L.A. in the Seventies, and the relevance of that model today. She argues that contemporary architecture suffers from an overvaluation of self-expression–at a moment when the individual is actually vanishing–Eric Owen Moss responds that his sense of self-expression is the creation of space. When she describes her most recent experience of Culver City as a compellingly messy collage of old and new, anonymous and strikingly personal structures, Moss rejects the relevance of collage, stressing how each project responds to specific conditions. Lavin and Moss respond to audience comments on anonymity, industrial architecture, SCI-Arc’s pedagogy, the value of analysis and research, and changes and continuities in architecture culture during the last decade.
