Eric Owen Moss Honored with Austrian Decoration of Honor for Science and Art

Eric Owen Moss was awarded an Austrian Decoration of Honor for Science and Art during a cere­mony at the Hofburg Palace on June 21. The award is presented by the Austrian Federal President to individuals who have “distinguished themselves and earned general acclaim through especially superior creative and commendable services in the areas of the sciences or the arts.” Moss was honored alongside the attorney Manfred Burgstaller and the artist Oswald Oberhuber, who join the ranks of recipients including Marina Abramovic (2008), Václav Havel (2005), Hans Hollein (1990), and Elias Canetti (1972)

Moss has also released two new publications this spring. Eric Owen Moss: The New City: I’ll See It When I Believe It chronicles the twenty-five year history of Moss’s transformative work on the Hayden Tract in Culver City, California. Since 1991, Eric Owen Moss Architects has completed more than fifty building renovations and several ground-up projects in the area. The book was published by Rizzoli Press and features extensive documentation of Moss’s projects and essays by SCI-Arc trustees Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne, visiting faculty members Jeffrey Kipnis, Michael Sorkin, and Wolf Prix.

Eric Owen Moss Architects/3585 offers a unique look at Moss’s conceptual underpinnings and design process through a comprehensive presentation of three schemes his office designed on a single site in the Hayden Tract since 1991: the Hayden Tower of 1991, the Ten Towers Proposal of 1999, and the Cactus Tower and Waffle, completed in 2012 and 2015, respectively. The book was edited by SCI-Arc faculty member Todd Gannon and was published by Applied Research and Design Publishing.

Eric Owen Moss is principal and lead designer at Eric Owen Moss Architects. Moss has held teaching positions at major universities around the world including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. Moss has also been a longtime professor at SCI-Arc, and served as its Director from 2003-2015. EOMA has been the recipient of over 100 local, national, and international design awards. Moss is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture and was honored with the AIA/LA Gold Medal in 2001, and as the AIA/LA Educator of the Year in 2006. He received the Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. In 2007 he was honored with the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, and in 2011 he was awarded the Jencks Award by RIBA. In 2012 Moss received the International Design Award for Samitaur Tower, and the AIA|LA 25 Year Award for the Petal House. In 2014 Moss was awarded a P/A Award for the Albuquerque Rail Yards Master Plan, featured as a “Game Changer” in Metropolis Magazine, and inducted into the National Academy.