lgn2807

Eric Owen Moss: exploring the poetry of laminated glass

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1943, Eric Owen Moss received his B.A. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1965 and his M. Arch. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1968. He also received an M. Arch degree from Harvard in 1972. He has been a Professor of Design at the Southern California Institute of Technology since 1974.

The Umbrella, Culver City, California (1999)

Much of Moss’s built work consists of an ongoing effort to renovate industrial buildings in Culver City, sponsored by a promoter who owns The Hayden Tract in this district of Los Angeles. Culver City pieces like ‘The Umbrella’ (completed in 1999) are renovations that do not fundamentally alter the exterior forms of the existing structures but rather add a sculptural, laminated glass element whose origin is linked to the spaces. It is the addition of the laminated glass element that often gives an unusual identity to the completed projects. The curved laminated glass used by Moss in the Culver City projects is supplied by California Glass Bending of Los Angeles.

Inside Moss's "Beehive", Culver City, California

Laminated Glass News: How do you approach architecture?

Eric Owen Moss: Each project is meant not only as a durable paradigm but as a provisional paradigm, a hypothesis if you like. This ‘conclusion that there’s no conclusion’ is as old as the hills – it goes back to the Book of Job through to Sartre and Kierkegaard. I find it very liberating. Looking at architecture this way frees you. It allows you to see the various parts of a building as opportunities once you’re released from the past, just as early 20th century literary figures like James Joyce, EE Cummings or Gertrude Stein and late 20th century composers like John Cage broke with what went before. Only then you have to talk to other people – like material suppliers, contractors and structural engineers and persuade them to listen to you!

LGN: Please tell us about the way you’ve used laminated glass in the renovation of The Queens Museum of Art, New York (2001).

Eric Owen Moss: We were asked to expand the museum from the northern section of the building to the entire building, also adding a space for performance arts. The initial design is surgical; the centre of the building is removed, exposing the panoramic enclosure inside as a primary solid. A re-enclosed central volume, covered in laminated glass, becomes the spatial main event for public performances, art displays, musical performances, dramatic presentations and a multipurpose space. The broader public is exposed to contemporary art also because the pedestrian circulation on the site has been redirected to pass around the perimeter of the building so that people can view the exhibition via the laminated glass without actually entering the museum

The Queens Museum of Art, New York (2001)

A laminated glass ‘drape’ re-encloses the main event area. The glass is transparent, translucent or opaque by turns, depending on the exhibits within. Glass colour is controlled by high voltage wires, which alter the glass from clear to opaque white.

If you’re an architect you can work with a building to alter the landscape of a city or to reflect human affairs. The Queens Museum of Art is significant historically because it housed the United Nations during the period 1945-50, at the time when the U.N. oversaw the partitioning of Palestine and of Korea. From the outside you see what looks like a volcanic lava flow of laminated glass pouring down the middle of the building and separating it into two parts.

LGN: Please tell us about the use of laminated glass in your design entry for the Guandong Museum in Guangzhong, China.

Guangzhong Museum, China (design entry)

Eric Owen Moss: The city of Guangzhong is growing at an unprecedented rate, particularly in a southern direction towards the Pearl River. In our entry for this project (won by Zaha Hadid) we had envisaged a linear pedestrian path called the Long Art March, seven metres wide, that connects a cultural and art square with the new museum. Paralleling the Art March is a ‘Glass Forest’ – a dense grouping of hollow laminated glass tubes – Glass Trees – that are aligned precisely on either edge of the pedestrian walk, and positioned more freely as the Glass Trees extend beyond the walk, along the hillside. The Glass Trees designate the territories of the urban development moving south and suggest an alternate landform and landscape, a new urban space and purpose, a civic space for arts, music, education and celebration.

The laminated Glass Trees were designed to be seven metres high and 0.75 metres in diameter. As the terrain varies in height, the glass cylinders were to have telegraphed the new profile of the land. In addition, the trees were to have bent in the wind and echoed the wind’s sounds as storms move up and down the Pearl River. Poetically, the flexing and resonating tubes form a transparent glass barrier, responsive to the noise of the wind, offering new views and sounds to the citizens of the city on their way to the museum or the opera. The glass trees were designed not only to reflect and refract sunlight but to contain electronic fixtures that were to have lit the walkway and the museum site.

So in effect I was using laminated glass here to make a barrier, to draw attention to the extension of the city but also to cut it off. It’s like the guy in Tian Anmen Square holding up his hand to the tanks; the glass is a signal, the Glass Trees are holding up their branches, if you like, to the unstoppable spread of the city.

LGN: Your design for a new entry hall for the Smithsonian Institution Patent Office Building (POB) in Washington DC is very beautiful. Even though the project was won by Norman Foster, you have been asked to exhibit your design at the Venice Biennale, among other venues.

Eric Owen Moss: Our design for the Smithsonian was based all around the use of laminated glass and shows just how fascinated I am with the material! The competition brief referred to the Smithsonian Institution POB as "America’s temple to the industrial arts". We aimed to add a dramatic contemporary chapter to the building’s history for its courtyard that echoes the spirit of technical and artistic progress of the existing building.

The Smithonian's Patent Office Building, Washington DC (design entry)

The design is based around a ‘Field of Glass Rods’. The roof design in the POB courtyard would have been poetically and technically unprecedented! It consists of a dense vertical amalgamation of laminated glass and steel rods of varying lengths that offer an ever-changing presence of light and sky, viewed through a spectacular, Seurat-like field of shining points. Simultaneously, the composite structure reaffirms the prominence of the original courtyard experience – the granite and sandstone wall
that form the Great Room are now sharpened and refocused in a new, reflected light. The iconic roof is not simply dramatic. In pragmatic terms the Field of Rods is both a courtyard-enclosing volume and a versatile, multi-purpose composite that simultaneously provides structural, technical and staging services for the Great Room.

The large laminated glass tubes both create the main visual shape of the roof and also form and compression struts for the trusses. The use of glass as a strut is a novel application but one that uses laminated glass in its most efficient manner – in compression. The tubular shape, apart from its aesthetic, is also a very efficient strut shape. The large number of fins, the use of laminated glass and the requirement for the tubes to be split all contribute to a multi-redundant structure that will remain in place and have a significant load-bearing capacity, even in the unlikely event of a breakage. In addition, the glass tubes are designed to give spectacular lighting – both down into the courtyard and up into the sky at night – and acoustic effects. This is a dialectic that interests me a lot: a volume of points of light so as to give a surface that is also a dense volume, a solid. It’s a thick structure on the ceiling that is also so transparent that in a sense it’s not there at all - because it’s made of glass. Only laminated glass could be used here because of safety and also because to carry the compressive load it had to be laminated.

This is really the reason why I’m fascinated by using laminated glass in architecture: it’s glass yet it’s strong and solid; it’s transparent yet it’s an object; it has a surface yet it can be used to give volume.

LGN: In which ways do you foresee working with laminated glass in the future?

Eric Owen Moss: My recent projects have a lot to do with laminated glass and what it reveals as an opening into another world. For me, the art of using laminated glass depends on the poetry you can achieve, not the fact that it is bullet-resistant and so on. For me, the structural properties alone are not what will encourage architects to use laminated glass to make a new world. It’s the hand of the artist that will draw attention to a project and allow you to see the old world differently.