The Southern California Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians will offer a four-hour tour of Eric Owen Moss' amazing buildings in Culver City's Hayden Tract this Saturday, August 18, from 10am to 2pm. The event is $29 for SAH/SCC members and $55 for non-members.

The day will include a panel discussion featuring Frederick & Laurie Samitaur-Smith (whose Samitaur Constructs helped bring the buildings to fruition), a self-conducted walking tour of more than 20 buildings and art installations in the area, light refreshments at the Samitaur Tower, and closing remarks. For more information, go HERE. 

I've never heard the term before, but apparently this area of the Hayden Tract is known as "Conjunctive Points." Even the Urban Land Institute calls it Conjunctive Points in it's development case study of this area:

Located in a formerly devastated industrial section of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, Conjunctive Points offers a new way of thinking about what buildings are, and how they relate to each other, to commerce, and to art. With courage and tenacity, its developers are transforming a 22 acre (8.9 hectare) tract in Los Angeles and Culver City’s industrial zone into a unique urban environment that supports and incubates future technologies as it brings together creative individuals from the arts and industries in a physically and intellectually stimulating community, while at the same time converting environmental liabilities into extraordinary assets.

Developers Samitaur Constructs received no governmental or institutional aid for the project, and had to use inventive financing practices and personally guarantee early loans, since the area was seen as a high risk for investment and was effectively redlined. (National lenders now have replaced local banks in financing the project.) The developers and the architect have collaborated to design and develop strikingly unusual buildings—with names like the Stealth, the Umbrella, and the Beehive—that contain innovative workspaces now occupied by entertainment executives, film production companies, Internet-based firms, designers, dancers, and artisans. The project was instrumental in establishing an ordinance that allows architecture to fulfill the city’s public art requirement. Government studies indicate that Conjunctive Points has generated 8,500 new jobs.

Conjunctive Points already has been a catalyst for growth and development outside its own physical boundaries. Occupancy in the area has gone from 20 percent to nearly 85 percent, while business investment has increased by more than 200 percent, and property values and business taxes have risen by more than 500 percent. All of this has been accomplished with virtually no gentrification: there has been only a 2.2 percent turnover in the neighborhood.