Only the most beady-eyed of visitors to Carlo Ratti’s Venice Architecture Biennale will have spotted a curious contribution by Eric Owen Moss, Culver City’s erstwhile “jeweler of junk.” In an exhibition that appeared to be intent on resuscitating an aging American avant-garde, his presence was only fitting.
Tucked into one of the aisles that flank the robotic chaos of the Arsenale, Moss’s project posits, through a handful of spare drawings, a “conceptual redo” of his 708 House, built in Pacific Palisades in 1982 and sadly incinerated in the recent wildfires, its playful flying buttresses, cheeky gangplank, and pomo supergraphics all gone up in smoke.
While the original residence affected a workaday posture—Moss used timber and stucco to remodel a 1940s Case Study house—the reboot, called 708/2, goes full throttle, in tune with the eighty-two-year-old architect’s late-baroque, end-of-the-world phase. It sports an undulating double-curved roof, crowned with an outdoor spa that, the caption explains, moonlights as a private reservoir. Stepped rooftop seating provides …