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Frederick and Laurie Samitaur-Smith are transforming a dried-up industrial
wasteland into an architectural wonderland.
By Jonathan Ringen
January 2002
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Above, left to right: Frederick Samitaur-Smith, Laurie
Samitaur-Smith, and Eric Owen Moss.
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Part of a commercial complex the Umbrella building (1999; above, left) was
designed for outdoor performances. The Pittard Sullivan building (1997;
above, right) reuses the bowstring trusses of the warehouse that once stood on
the site.
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Ten years ago there was no reason to visit Culver City, a dried-up industrial
section of Los Angeles that surely challenged Gertrude Stein's Oakland for
lack of a "there." As Architect Eric Owen Moss says, "There's
that old joke about L.A.: you get off the freeway at the wrong place or
you get off at the right place, and it doesn't make any goddamn difference."
But something remarkable has happened to this community in the interim.
A line of idiosyncratic buildings--mostly radical reconfigurations
of existing warehouses, but recently entirely new large-scale structures--has
grown along a diagonal strip that cuts through the neighborhood. Property
values in the immediate area have soared 500 percent; every spring and summer
thousands of design students come from all over the world to study it.
The buildings, which now number more than a dozen and extend beyond the
Culver City limits into Los Angeles proper, are all designed by a single
architect: Moss. These projects have made him one of only three working
L.A. architects with a global reputation (along with Frank Gehry and Thom
Mayne). But even he would hesitate to claim authorship of the overall scheme.
That credit goes to his clients, the husband-and-wife team of Frederick
and Laurie Samitaur-Smith. A former journalist and a scriptwriter, Frederick
got his start in development in the early 1970s when the trees died on a
prune farm he owned in Northern California (in what would later become part
of Silicon Valley). He used the land to put up offices for the nascent
computer industry. "He was building gigantic boxes and realized when
he'd visit the tenants that they were working with a new kind of math that
didn't apply at all to the linear spaces he was building," his wife
says. "He felt that if we did buildings that were based on the geometries
that this new industry was utilizing all day long, they would have a natural--if
not conscious, at least subconscious--attraction to this architecture."
They decided to locate their experiment in Culver City, where Frederick
had purchased a few industrial buildings from his father. The tenants they
envisioned would come from the computer side of the increasingly high-tech
entertainment industry. "We came up with the idea that we wanted to
take a section of the city and rebuild it," Frederick says. "But
I didn't have enough money to do it the traditional way--to just go in and
buy a whole part of a city, and bulldoze it and rebuild it." Instead
the Smiths acquired land at various points along a line through the 57-acre
area they were interested in--assuming that when developed these plots would
serve as the seeds of the neighborhood's revitalization.
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The Kodak building (1995) sits on steel legs (above) atop an access road.
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This courtyard (above), which has a fountain and outdoor seating for
employees, hangs over the entrance ramp to the road.
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In the mid-1980s the Smiths began searching for an architect who could understand
their vision of a complex architecture mirroring the nonlinear mathematics
of computer-chip design. They were turned down by every notable designer
in town. Moss was a tenant in a building that Frederick was managing at
the time. "One day Frederick went into this small space he'd rented
to this unknown architect to get the rent check, and noticed his drawings
on the wall and T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets on his desk," Laurie
says. "Let's be frank--this was desperation time. He walked into a
tenant's office and thought, 'Why not try it on this guy?'--because
no one else was responding."
From the first building--a relatively small warehouse conversion that
was completed in 1990--the relationship has been remarkably collaborative.
"They don't give you a project and say, 'This is the site, this is
the height, this is the setback, this is the program: build it,'" Moss
says. "The really preliminary conceptual analysis and discussion with
lawyers, accountants, city-planning people, banks--all of the early conceptual
issues are just batted back and forth, and the best idea wins. That's an
expression of enormous trust and confidence. And then there are no
excuses. You can't say the client did it, the building department did it,
the bank did it, the budget did it. We're in there from the beginning. I
think that's really the key to how this works."
The Smiths have an almost evangelical belief in both the transforming power
of good design and the damaging potential of poor planning. "The L.A.
riots were produced by bad architecture," Laurie asserts, referring
to the dehumanizing effects of low-income housing. "We really do believe
that architecture can have a serious negative influence for the people
who exist within it, just as it can have a serious positive influence
on people's lives."
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