Eric Owen Moss Samitaur Tower Culver City, California - Essay Example

ome to terms with something that vehemently challenges the status quo, giving way to forms and features that defy preconceived notions and set views about the relationship between functionality and form. It would not be wrong to say that ‘Samitaur Tower’ in Culver City is an apt representative of the typically Californian constructivism, which accomplishes, energizes and animates the surrounding landscape with its bold defiance, almost naïve and innocent tendency to challenge set notions and the innate tendency to redefine architecture by going for the possible and phantasmagoric permutations and combinations resulting out of the interplay between form and functionality.

Of course, it would be totally simplistic to say that ‘Samitaur Tower’ is merely an information tower located at one corner of Hayden Avenue and National Boulevard, near the primary entry point to the redeveloped section of Culver City (Anderton 29). In fact, ‘Samitaur Tower’ is much more than this (Anderton 29). It is not merely a landmark representing the entry into a newer section of the Culver City, but rather boldly and somewhat audaciously represents entry into a new era of modern architecture, where an architectural innovation supersedes over all the requirements of form, functionality, environment and even user.

The Tower marks an initiation of the era where the form, functionality, landscape and the end user stand subservient to a marvel of abstraction that though being under control, leaves no stone unturned to project an image of defiance, rebelliousness and one-upmanship. An architectural wonder that though in its very essentials intends to serve a set and preconceived function, somehow manages to explode in the yearning to give way to something that is much more than mere functionality. In that context the ‘Samitaur Tower’ could be interpreted as being the extreme of something both good and bad, a beautiful building signifying the unrestrained expression of Id, and