From the Los Angeles Times:
Architecture review: A bold landmark by the Expo Line
Eric Owen Moss' Samitaur Tower in Culver City will display video and artwork visible to transit riders on the light-rail line.
By Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic
September 1, 2010
For the most part, the buildings designed for spots near new mass transit lines in Southern California have been pretty underwhelming architecturally. And it's easy to be cynical about many of them. After all, putting a new apartment building or mixed-use complex close to an existing transit line — or a transit line that may potentially, possibly be built in the future — often absolves developers of a range of architectural and urban-planning sins, including packing in far more density than a site can comfortably absorb.
But a few genuinely thought-provoking responses to the region's hard-won progress on the mass-transit front are beginning to emerge. Among them is the recently completed Samitaur Tower, a 72-foot-high weathered-steel structure designed by Eric Owen Moss for a site at the corner of National Boulevard and Hayden Avenue in Culver City.
The tower is a campanile — an unorthodox and modestly sized one, to be sure — for a new stage of urbanism in Southern California, which thanks to the slowly growing transit network, among other cultural shifts, is beginning to emerge as a less atomized and more public place than the old clichés would have you believe.
The tower will overlook the new light-rail Expo Line, which is under construction from downtown through Culver City and will open next year. (A planned second phase would extend the line to Santa Monica.) A section of the rail line runs alongside National Boulevard, practically at the tower's feet, with a pair of stops within easy walking distance. The tower's developers, Frederick and Laurie Samitaur-Smith, see it as a prototype and hope to build seven more along the Expo Line.
The open-air tower, which according to the Samitaur-Smiths won't open to the public until early next year, consists of five platforms wrapped in screens made of translucent acrylic. The screens are designed to display a range of video and artwork, making the structure, which Moss has called an "information tower," an island of alternative signage in L.A.'s sea of commercial billboards.
Once it's fully in operation, it will likely play host to a mixture of parties, art exhibits and openings, as well as serving as a symbolic gateway to the Hayden Tract, a former industrial area that the Samitaur-Smiths, with help from Moss, have been patiently and inventively redeveloping for more than two decades.
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