Edge-city spectacle.

Eric Owen Moss' latest addition to the fragmented urban landscape of Culver City in Los Angeles is a boldly gestural speculative office development intended to symbolise the area's civic renewal.

Over the last 10 years, Eric Owen Moss has been engaged in a series of interventions in Culver City, an amorphous and decaying light industrial zone in central Los Angeles (AR September 1992). Noted for their starting iconoclastic quality, Moss's gestural schemes fracture and distort the shells of existing warehouses, transforming tracts of moribund space into animated, signature buildings, fit for corporate recolonisation by the industries that are LA's creative and economic lifeblood - advertising, film, graphics, television and so on. Apart from Moss's evolving preoccupation with a sculptural materiality that hovers at the more humane end of Deconstruction, his buildings also embody a larger civic mandate, suggesting visionary alternative strategies for urban redevelopment.

In this tentative reclamation of Culver City's peripheral badlands, Moss has established a crucially symbiotic relationship with his developer patrons Fred and Laurie Samitaur Smith. This most recent project, the Samitaur Building, dates back to 1989 when the Smiths asked Moss to develop a proposal for renovating a dilapidated industrial building with a traditional sawtooth roof into speculative offices. The site was caught up in the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which had the effect of temporarily putting the project on hold (and potentially jeopardising it altogether), only now is it complete.

Taking the configuration and functions of the existing warehouse complex as its starting point, the Samitaur Building is hoisted into the air, above the exigencies of turning circles and fire regulations. Spectacularly elevated on a series of pilotis, the narrow, two-storey volume is a startling presence in the nebulous, edge-city landscape. The columns are positioned in relation to openings and vehicle access points at ground level, generating an irregular structural rhythm. The muscular beams that support the building are set at variable angles between the columns; Moss has described the resulting skewed, bridge-like structure as a 'freeway designed by a drunk ... who sees the world precisely but differently'. The open space underneath is part public arcade, part loading bay.

The building is coated in an amorphous, greenish-hued stucco, giving it a curiously organic quality, emphasised by a series of contorted geometrical incidents that subvert the orthogonal regularity of the building. At the west end is an entrance stair housed in an expressively fractured volume that resembles a mutated hour-glass - except as Moss notes, 'people instead of sand, filter up and down'. Halfway along the elongated north elevation is a pentagonal doubt-height courtyard, suspended above the ground, a modern baroque balcony, providing surprising panoramas over the raw, industrial surroundings. Finally, at the east end of the building, where a set of lifts links the new and existing structures, a double-height boardroom projects over the shark's fin gables of the original warehouse. Set against the challenging pyrotechnics of the exterior, the interior is a simple, flexible volume of lettable space, capable of subdivision as required. Clearly this project is about symbolising civic renewal through the creation of a boldly idiosyncratic external form, rather than innovative internal planning. Those companies spirited enough to relocate to this part of town will presumably make their own arrangements.