Eric Owen Moss delivered his farewell address as Dean of Sci Arc last week
“I’m the ENEMY!” Moss hollered as he stepped onto the dais in front of a packed hall at SCI-Arc, awaiting his final address as dean last Thursday. Moss might as well have said, “This is Cinerama,” as the single projection that had backgrounded the introductory remarks dramatically opened into three-synced projections producing a single, massive image that stretched along the entirety of the wall. A cartoon monkey is startled by his reflection and the text above reads, “We have met the enemy and he is u̶s̶ me."
Before Moss began his lecture, aptly titled “Not Farewell but Fare Forward,” Tom Gilmore and Hernan Diaz Alonso delivered laudatory introductions. Gilmore described Moss as alternating between Don Quixote and his sidekick Sancho Panza, the first in a series of references to Cervantes’ work, apparently something that Moss has himself cultivated in prior talks. Alonso, who will succeed Moss as dean of the school, attempted to provide “20 seconds [of] touch-touchy feely-feely,” to express his admiration for Moss, but it only seemed to last about six. Like Gilmore, Alonso referenced Don Quixote, this time in connection to the Spanish game mus, incidentally invented contemporaneously with Cervantes’ life, and which requires players to announce their intention to either win or lose before the game commences. In both introductions, admiration for Moss was conveyed with equal measure of irreverence and humor, appropriate for an architect who has created a brand rooted in a particular conception of rebellion, of being in relation to “the enemy.”