In 1998 the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio joined with SFMOMA and MoMA in a three-museum exhibition and debate examining the intersection of new conceptual design ideas with the burgeoning new capacity to construct objects that, so often in the past, could only be imagined.

The divide that separated visionary architecture from the technical capacity to realize those visions, from Gaudí and Mendelsohn to Lebbeus Woods, seemed suddenly to be narrowing. Now, the hypothesis went, if you could see it in your head, you could deliver it on the site. And the premise of that exhibit and the surrounding discourse has clearly been confirmed in the recent construction of building ideas that once came to life only in drawing...

The Wexner Center in Columbus was designed by New York architect Peter Eisenman as an admixture of an historic, largely masonry structure and an exhaustive examination of the organizational prospects of the steel grid, as the new building addition. The orthogonal system - the grid as conceptual premise in architecture and city planning - runs backwards for millennia, with landmark stops from Hippodamus at Miletus, the first gridded city plan, to the Park Avenue Lever House and Seagram Building.

The Wexner exhibit constructed that prospect of a center for debate, surrounded by the studied manifestations of gridded neutrality.

Not long after the three-museum exhibition, the Moss office was invited to design a high-rise structure in Los Angeles at the corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Jefferson Avenue, adjacent to a long anticipated surface rail stop intended to connect the Westside of Los Angeles with downtown. The site is located in the south-central portion of Los Angeles in a poor, minority area, well known for two race riots, but for little else - left dormant for years as various other parts of the city were redeveloped.

The high-rise project was designed, applying the antithetical grid premise first used in the Dancing Bleachers. The tower buildings - there were initially two - were designed without the conventional orthogonal order of columns and beams, but rather were supported with a dense, curvilinear order of ribbons, neither beams nor columns, that densely circumscribe and support the building.

The Moss office received final planning and design approval from the City of Los Angeles in 2008 to construct the high-rise, now a single tower, that will adjoin the downtown-to-the-Westside surface rail route currently under construction.

The tower is called Bondage.

Today the single tower building is being re-drawn and re-engineered by Greg Otto at Buro Happold, interrogating the original conceptual strategy and form-making capacity first examined in the Dancing Bleachers.

Construction will begin in 2010.

The Moss exhibit at SCI-Arc, scheduled for May 2009, re-examines both the content of the Wexner exhibition and the premises of the Bondage Tower at La Cienega and Jefferson. Again, the ubiquitous grid of the surrounding concrete gallery space, and, by implication, the enduring grid pro forma that continues to inhabit the planning and architecture discourse is contested by the curvilinear spatial nemesis.