"Pterodactyl" is an office building for an advertising agency, built in 2015 by the bureau of Eric Moss, a deconstructivist and author, in particular, of the sensational competition project for the new stage of the Mariinsky Theater. The Culver City building in Los Angeles is the last phase of the Wedgwood Campus, a group of office buildings in warehouse buildings from the 1940s. All other buildings of the complex: Stealth, Umbrella, Section and Rear Section, were also built by Eric Moss; “Pterodactyl” is the final chord of the ensemble. There are three-story houses around, and from above there is a view of the entire neighborhood, of Santa Monica and further west to the Pacific Ocean.
The building is a superstructure on the roof of a four-storey garage for 800 cars, built in 1998 as the foundation of the future building, and not subsequently implemented. But the exits of the steel structures remained; Moss architects extended the base frame, connecting it to the steel frame of their superstructure. Offices - two tiers, the lower one, located on the roof of the garage, is an open space with a glass facade. Above, grouping over the western edge of the garage, there are nine separate volumes of meeting rooms and offices, connected by passages between themselves and with the lower tier. They also resemble a deconstructed pterodactyl, which disintegrated into glass-metal cubes, poured onto an old concrete parking lot from some kind of heavenly basket.
The outer layer of the building - the roof and the facade - are made of blue-gray titanium-zinc RHEINZINK using the technology of scales and large rhombuses. A total of 1097 m² (3 tons) of titanium-zinc RHEINZINK and 5800 m² (21 tons) for the facades were used for the roof.
“We wanted to use a relatively small palette of materials,” says Raúl Garcia, architect and design team member, “that helped us focus on the functional aspects of the form.”
All calculations were performed in the BIM model based on the developments of the Frank Gehry Catia company, which made it possible to achieve high accuracy.
