Eric Owen Moss is flipping through architecture magazines in his Culver City office. There's Moss' 708 House on one cover, his Petal House on another, his Adams House on another. Nearly two dozen magazines are marked to indicate photographs of his projects, but he hasn't a clue what the captions say. He can't read Japanese.
Moss hasn't built a thing in Japan. He was invited to compete for Tokyo's New National Theatre a few years ago, but he didn't get the commission. Yet his work has been exhibited in Tokyo galleries, he's lectured in Japan and he just shepherded a group of Japanese university students through his crowded offices here.
"The story's not over yet," Moss says. "The presumption is that given the (Japanese magazines') wide distribution, the right people will see them. I'll be able to spread the contagion of Los Angeles around the world."
He won't be the first. David Martin, who designed Sanwa Bank Plaza in downtown Los Angeles, is working on both a large resort and a health club complex in Japan. And Jon Jerde, who brought us both Los Angeles' Westside Pavilion and San Diego's Horton Plaza, is redesigning chunks of Japanese cities as well as helping to create new ones.
Much as out-of-towners like Pei Cobb Freed & Partners nabbed the Los Angeles Convention Center expansion and Richard Meier won the Getty Center commission, so are more and more Los Angeles architects packing suitcases. In Tokyo alone, Southern California-based Morphosis is doing an office tower, Josh Schweitzer is designing restaurants, Frederick Fisher is designing apartment buildings and Ted Tanaka is designing a mausoleum (see Page 5).
Informed by international publications and Hollywood movies, linked by satellites, cellular phones and fax machines, the world's design community is getting smaller. Talking about Johnson, Fain and Pereira's huge resort project in Guam, for instance, a Micronesian business journal recently referred to that firm's "Die Hard" building (Fox Plaza, where the film's exteriors were shot). And Santa Monica-based Moore Ruble Yudell is doing a housing project in Kobe, Japan, for a real estate developer who first saw the firm's work in Berlin.
Southern California has clearly become a major player on the world's architecture game board. Numerous Southern California architects have projects in various stages of development in Japan, and Japanese businessmen regularly make what Jerde calls "Lewis and Clark expeditions" here to identify architecture and architects they'd like to see at home.
