Eric Owen Moss Architects and owners Frederick and Laurie Smith have been at work on this urban re-design project since 1988.

The planning conception includes a portion of Central Los Angeles bounded by the Ballona Creek, La Cienega Boulevard and Jefferson Avenue; the Hayden Tract area of Culver City along Hayden Avenue and National Boulevard; and the neighborhood east and south of the intersection of Washington and Ince Boulevards in Culver City.

Together the three sites which include forty-three buildings - constructed or in process - are an evolving master plan for reconstituting a deteriorating central city industrial and manufacturing center.

There is no fixed master plan, but there are changing notions of purpose, site use, and building organization. Over the years, the governing principles have remained fluid so that, depending on the status of planning, design, and construction in a particular area, several concept plans are in operation simultaneously.

Projects are never defined as single buildings on single properties. Rather, fundamental design decisions always include large scale strategies for land use, pedestrian and vehicular movement, and a sense that we must accommodate a continuously changing city.

The New City is both unique and archetypal - unique to its three Los Angeles and Culver City sites, and generic in that it embodies a number of conceptual perspectives applicable to the re-design and re-inhabiting of the many post-industrial urban areas in the United States and Europe.