The Loop

In the book "The New City: I'll See It When I Believe It" written by Eric Owen Moss, he stated that Architecture at its best is intrinsically at risk. Architecture and risk are synonyms. No risk? No freedom... There's a profound tension, even anxiety, located between past and future. It's inevitable. Learn to cultivate that anxiety. Moss's experiment in Culver City through years of intervention with his architecture gradually turned what used to be a declining industrial wasteland into a creative district. The ambition in this project is obvious, using Moss's own words "is less concerned with the history as a study of what's past, and more concerned with the history we will make in the future...Now our job is to tell architecture what has been left out, what was missed. Build what is missing, that is the challenge." Located in Culver City, California, the project sits on a small satellite campus of four buildings, Gary Group, designed by Eric Owen Moss himself. The fifth building is an ambitious one, largely preserves the existing four buildings, but also makes some kind of interaction and relationship to it, at the same time, go bold. The project is an extension upon four existing buildings in Culver City. The design intends to keep the majority of the existing buildings and structure, and add on top of them. New construction intersects the existing buildings in different degrees—traveling on top (0%), on the corner (10%), partially inside (50%), or in complete intersection (100%)—connecting old and new fabric. Two intersecting loops organize the scheme in elevation and plan. The top view of the third horizontal ring covers the four existing buildings, while Ring 1 and Ring 2 provide 360-degree views of the city. The vertical rings serve as residential lofts and the horizontal rings as offices; the intersections of the two become communal spaces. Private office, retail, residential amenities, residential, and public entrance programs are distributed through the ring system. Section studies document how the rings meet the ground and how floor slabs are supported by a vertical primary structure. Site plans and structure studies—including inventory of existing conditions—show the interaction between old and new buildings and the facade system. Models demonstrate feasibility: floor slabs supported by the vertical primary structure, and concept studies test how the extension reads at the scale of the neighborhood.