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 residents and their guests with a front-row view of the bathing/firefighting action.
This billowing wellness canopy is supported on either side by a marching line of unusual columns and struts—a shaggy synthesis of the look-at-me bibelots of the earlier project. Moss describes 708/2, in self-consciously ostentatious terms, as “a distended recollection of things past”; the AI-generated summary forgoes the usual French theory for institutional boilerplate: “The redesign uses memory, resilience, and formal experimentation into a fire-adaptive rebirth.”
But the burning question is whether a firefighter would actually be able to get up to the rooftop reservoir-spa, should the worst happen. The fire ladder rises against the façade, before twisting out in a theatrical twirl, adding an extra dose of drama to the ascent—as if firefighting weren’t exciting enough.