110+

Jordan Mozer is a designer of surprising contradictions. Having pursued a specificallyAmerican form of storytelling through his designs for the likes of Bellagio in Las Vegas andthe Hudson Club in Chicago, he despises the impulse towards homogeneity in the US. Hebegins all designs with a service plan, yet pursues the expressionistic potential ofarchitecture. Howard Watson provides insights into the work of a designer who has provedas successful in Germany as in his hometown of Chicago.

Practice Profile

Hudson Club,Chicago, Illinois, 1997Based in Chicago, JMA has createdseveral high-profile local restaurantsincluding the Hudson Club, which continuedthe firm’s tradition of playing with references fromAmerican design. Partially inspired by Norman Bel Geddes’futuristic 1929 design of an aeroplane, the design drawson Art Deco, yet distorts elements such as portholesto give the impression of the speed of flight

Jordan Mozer & Associates:New American Narratives

Over the last 20 years, the Chicago-based practice Jordan Mozer &Associates (JMA), has exploredspecifically American narratives bydrawing on geographical and culturallocality for the creation of highlyidiosyncratic and successful restaurant,bar and retail interiors. With the recentcompletion of an acclaimed hotel inGermany and two new restaurantbuildings that have shocked theAmerican suburbs, the practice’s highlyintuitive and narrative approach is nowmaking an impact both overseas and inthe realm of the newbuild. It has alsodrawn up daring plans for a curvaceousnew retail city in the desert. Curiouslyenough, it all started with a pet pig(more of which later).

Perhaps narrative architecture couldbe seen as a dead end in terms ofclassification – it is easy to argue thatall buildings, no matter how prosaic,introduce some form of narrative evenif the story is dissipated by therepetition of form or is confused byincoherent embellishment. However,the work of Jordan Mozer can bemeaningfully determined as narrative,and he does not shy away fromexplaining both his influences and theresultant designs in the form of a story,even explicitly referring to his wish tocreate ‘a once upon a time feeling’.Mozer’s approach certainly bearscomparison to the ideas that were beingestablished almost simultaneously byNigel Coates and Narrative ArchitectureToday (NATO) in London. Coates createdNATO with a group of his students in1983 when their work was deemed not‘architectural’ by the ArchitecturalAssociation (AA), and they went on toespouse a multidisciplinary approachwhereupon seemingly divergent storiesor cultural references are placedtogether in a new context. Mozerhimself is a multidisciplinarianartist/designer/architect who wasfrustrated by his teachers’ proscriptivemantra as to what constitutesarchitecture and, like Coates, he clearlyenjoys pushing boundaries through

cultural juxtaposition. Mozer, though, isan interested admirer rather than aconscious co-conspirator of Coates(listing him alongside the likes of RonArad and Frank Gehry as architects towhose work he is attracted), and thedesigns that result from their narrativeapproaches are very different.

If a label has to be prescribed,Mozer’s is more likely to read ‘NewAmerican’ rather than ‘old NATO’. Thedesigner and his practice have created aspecifically American-influenced formof storytelling through the built form,and his association with some of themajor players of American culture,such as the film-maker George Lucas,restaurateur Richard Melman, Disneyand hotelier Steve Wynn, are testamentto this. This roll call of famouscollaborators could infer that Mozer isknee-deep in the blandness andsuperficiality of commercial Americanculture, but the opposite is true. Herevels in the heterogeneity of Americansociety, and is an animated enemy ofemotionally superficial content and thereduction of the range of influences onthe built environment.

Mozer was initially drawn tosculpture and art, studying at the ArtInstitute of Chicago, and also studiedwriting at the University of Wisconsin. Itwas at Wisconsin in 1977 that he had a‘road to Damascus’ moment when hisroommate, an art history student, drewhis attention to the similarity betweenhis paintings and the buildings of Gaudí.‘I decided then and there to go toarchitecture school as I saw that it waspossible to be expressive – like sculpture– in buildings, and I didn’t understandthat before.’1 Following degrees in botharchitecture and product design at theUniversity of Illinois, he formed his ownChicago practice at a young age,becoming involved in restaurant designand linking up with George Lucas for ascheme to experiment with thepossibilities of the shopping mallexperience. Recession put paid to thatidea, but the early 1990s brought successwith designs for the Vivere restaurant in

Chicago and, most significantly, thecommission for the Cypress Clubrestaurant in San Francisco. Shortly afterthe Cypress Club project, architect JeffCarloss joined Mozer and both thestructure and ethos of JMA, which isnow a mid-size practice with about 18employees, were established.

Entering a Mozer-designed spacesuch as the Cypress Club is to walk intoan apparently surreal, filmic fantasythat begins with the approach to thefacade as a prologue, followed bysuggestions of the story through theunusual doorway and handle, before theinterior envelops the customer in amultilayered world that has side-stepped accepted logic and proportion.Mozer cites Jorge Luis Borges as well asthe surrealists as a major influence:‘There’s a lot of structure to Borges thathe messes with. He does it so well thatyou don’t see the structure.’ Similarly,though Mozer’s work may seemfantastical, it is deeply rooted in anunderstanding of how spaces work inboth a narrative and functional manner.The design always begins with a serviceplan to find the optimum functionalityof the space before any creative ideasare thoroughly discussed.

It is crucial to Mozer’s work that it isenvironmentally responsive rather thanformulaic. He ties his practice’sapproach to his love of magic realism:‘In Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s work,there’s a mystery to it, an unfoldingthat references backwards and forwardsall the time. He is writing for theAmericas, he’s writing for a blend ofEurope, Africa and the indigenouspeoples of the Americas. He is foundedin the place. This is a very importantthing for me, that each project isfounded in the place. What I absolutelyhate is how things have becomehomogenised. So much of Bond Street isthe same as Rodeo Drive. So manyhotels are homogenised. Márquez has arelationship between where he’s fromand where the story is set. He takes thereality of the Europeans, our sense oftime, our sense of relationships, our

111+

expectations, but he also infuses thestory with the reality of the indigenouspeople and the African people, theirsense of time, their sense of legends,which make fantasy seem possible.There’s a contained logic and dimensionto what he’s doing.’

Márquez’s approach to storytellingwas to be mirrored by Mozer’s approachto designing the Cypress Club, whichestablished his ability to develop aspecifically West Coast – and suitablyfilmic – narrative that remains verydistinct from East Coast counterparts.

Restaurateur John Cunin’s CypressClub venture was anchored to the riseof a new American cuisine in California,with an emphasis on fresh, local andseasonal produce that would match theburgeoning sophistication of the localwines coming out of Napa and Sonoma.Mozer says: ‘We were looking for a wayto represent this new American foodculture. We were wondering what’sAmerican. Our architecture, especiallyin San Francisco, borrows tremendouslyfrom European architectural culture.John didn’t want to follow the tradition.So we started to look at postwarAmerican culture, which was verydistinct from European culture, as hereit was a time of optimism.’ Mozerwished to reinterpret the soft, roundfuturism of late 1940s and early 1950sAmerican car design and to takeelements from the classic San Franciscodiners of the same postwar period,particularly their non-European, 1.8-metre (6-foot) high wainscots, but healso played on the intimacy andmythology of European café society.Cunin and Mozer were also drawn tothe paintings of Thomas Hart Benton,who captured the American landscapeand the frontier mentality with whatMozer describes as ‘a soft realism thatwas a little bit bigger than life’.

However, Mozer needed a devicethrough which to reinterpret theseforms and match the new Americancuisine. It is here that the pig comes in.Mozer was inspired by the happilycurvaceous shapes formed by his pet pig

Clemente (named after the painterFrancesco Clemente) as it sat in front ofthe fire. He decided to create a ‘fatspace’, full of pudgy, organic shapes,hog-bellied beams, round lights andcurving walls that expressed the naturalbounty of the local produce as well asthe rounded forms of Benton’spaintings and the futurist cars of the1950s. Mozer’s wish to make sure thatevery element of the space carriedthrough this curved motif led him tocreate many of the fixtures and fittingsfor the space, which is something hecontinues to do for each project. Withthe success of the Cypress Club, theprinciples were in place for JMA to focuson intelligent, bespoke and unusualdesigns that are rooted in their locale.

The Cypress Club heralded a decadeof high-profile restaurant designs in theStates, including the Hudson Club inChicago, and Mozer’s involvement withDisney in Orlando and Steve Wynn’sBellagio hotel and casino in Las Vegas.Mozer’s work may be highly distinctive,but its signature curves and the way heinveigles comprehendible referencesmake them unthreatening andinclusive. His designs may be shocking,but people still enjoy being seated in thecentre of the narrative. ‘On one hand wewant the mythology that we usuallyrecognise at some point – the story ofthe building and of the neighbourhood,or of the kind of space it is – to belegible. We want people to becomfortable, but we want to contrastwith it things that don’t quite fit thestory … We don’t want to hurt anyone,but we want to surprise them andexcite them, and we want to create alittle bit of mystery.’ Mozer is inspiredby the blend of cultures that existwithin American society. However,instead of responding to this withblandness or a reduction to the average,he takes risks, drawing out the unusualand fantastical to deliver narratives thatfit within that heritage.

Despite espousing a ground-breakingAmerican-narrative style and havingbeen involved with the kind of high-

profile American commercialism thatcan bring a European architecturalcognoscente out in hives, Mozer hasbeen able to translate his principles fora European audience. In recent years,his work has been received withtremendous enthusiasm in Germany,where he has designed bars, restaurantsand stores, as well a children’s museumfor Volkswagen. When asked why hefeels his work has found such acclaim inGermany, he says it may be because‘German buildings are so rational.Because what we do is missing there.’He sees a similarity between Chicagofollowing the 1871 fire and manyGerman cities following the SecondWorld War, where devastation led tothe rapid rebuilding of urban areas. ‘Asa child growing up in Chicago, all theseModernist buildings, all the high-rises,felt sterile to me and they made meunhappy. In Chicago, I wanted to try tocreate spaces that were morecomfortable. There is the same problemin Germany with some of theirModernism – stripped down,inexpensive and soulless. I’m not ananti-Modernist, but I’m interested inappropriate Modernism. What issometimes missing in Germany is thedetails, those layers of information andsome of the warmth that used to bethere before it was bombed out.’

East, his 2005 award-winning hotelin Hamburg, shows his adeptness atensuring that his designs form acohesive narrative with a particularenvironment. It is made up of a formerfoundry building, now housing arestaurant and four bars, and a purpose-built guest-room block centred on asunken courtyard. The main diningspace is a cathedral-like, 12-metre (39-foot) high space surrounded by therising levels of bars, and features amonumental, sculptured wall ofwindows and huge carved pillars – it isa surreal, organic space which, likeMozer’s youthful paintings,immediately brings to mind the work ofGaudí . The origins of the building areevident in the exposed brickwork and in

112+

113+

JMA’s bespoke, metal and resin castingsof everything from furnishings tocandlesticks. The castings are inspiredby the foundry origins of the building,but the design is also influenced by anEastern recognition of spirituality.

As in East, the practice’s work oftenhas a central focus – Mozer refers to itas a ‘doughnut plan’ – where there is aring of seating or facilities cuspedaround a lower, central hole. This givesa space focus, intimacy andinclusiveness and furthers thepossibilities of the narrative. And it istaken to its extreme in GambaRistorante, JMA’s intriguing newbuild in

Merrillville, Indiana, which seems tocoil up from the earth. The firm’s othernewly built restaurant is Copper Bleu onthe outskirts of Minneapolis. Setalongside the anonymous new buildingsof a strip-mall development, it has leftpassers-by stunned and has become animmediate local sensation. Yet itscurving all-copper facades and itstwisting, rising and undulating roof aredirectly drawn from the surroundinglandscape, while elements of itscourtyard garden and interior evokememories of the local Midwesternpassion for life in the wild outdoors.Like Gamba Ristorante and the design

for the GGP City in the SouthwesternUS, Copper Bleu shows the extent ofJMA’s ambition to populate theAmerican landscape with locallyinspired narrative forms that revel inthe heterogeneity of the culture. 4

Howard Watson is a freelance journalist andauthor of Bar Style: Hotels and Members’ Clubs(2005), Hotel Revolution: 21st-Century HotelDesign (2005) and The Design Mix: Bars,Cocktails and Style (2006), all published by Wiley-Academy.

Note1 All quotations are from a series of conversationsbetween Jordan Mozer and Howard Watson.

Gamba Ristorante, Merrillville, Indiana, 2006The practice has recently stepped into the world of newbuild restaurants, taking the opportunity createdby the expanding American suburbs to design startling, brick- and metal-clad, curving buildings thatdraw upon the American landscape.

114+

Cypress Club, San Francisco, California, 1992The Cypress Club restaurant was a major earlysuccess for Jordan Mozer & Associates andestablished many of the working and ideologicalprinciples that have sustained the practice’sdevelopment. The interior, full of bulbous formsand curvaceous, handcrafted fittings, borders onthe surreal, but it is an extension of motifs of trueAmerican (rather than European colonial) design.Mozer ensures that his designs are drawn fromtheir physical and cultural locality, and reinterpretsreferences that are established in the regionalcollective consciousness. At the Cypress Club,these include the curving fenders and headlightfittings of futurist car design from the 1950s, the2-metre (6-foot) high wainscots and colourschemes of San Francisco diners from the sameperiod, and jazz, represented by Mozer’s paintedinterpretation of a Count Basie tune. Inspired bythe curved forms of a pig, he made almost all theelements rounded, picking up on the freshproduce theme of the Californian menu while alsooffering a soft, comforting experience.

115+

East, Hamburg, Germany, 2005East, which won a European Hotel Design Award in2005, features a 250-cover restaurant, four barsand hotel guest rooms situated in two buildings – arenovated foundry and a new block (the latterdesigned prior to JMA’s involvement) – cuspedaround a central courtyard. The main dining area,sunken so its floor is at cellar level, is dominated byorganically inspired, white sculptured plasterworkpillars and a three-storey wall – called the ‘Hive’ –with angled contours of plaster surrounding cut-out, internal windows. Four 8.5-metre (28-foot) highglass doors, leading out to the garden courtyard,constitute one side of the restaurant. Almost all ofthe interior design features of East have beenspecially created by JMA. Inspired by the building’sformer use as an iron foundry, many elements havebeen made from cast materials, includingaluminium-magnesium-alloy three-legged tablesand bar stools. The restaurant chairs and additionalbar stools are made from a colour-integrated,fibreglass-and-Kevlar-reinforced resin that hasbeen hand-finished to create a satin sheen. Thedesign is also imbued with an Eastern,philosophical appreciation of the spiritualperfection of natural forms, which marries with theoriental influence on East’s food and cocktails.

116+

Copper Bleu, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2006Prior to development as a shopping centre, the land around the Copper Bleu restaurant site was rolling farmland with deciduous forest and prairie grasses.Mozer says that the owner, Scott Winer, wanted to buck the trend towards chain restaurants in the American suburbs, envisaging a dining experience that wasrooted in local Midwestern, mid-century restaurant archetypes, but with modern, sophisticated and global influences. Evoking the local Dakota County prairielandscape and the outdoor cabin culture, the restaurant is made up of two undulating copper-clad buildings that wrap around a sunken terraced patiosurrounded by evergreens. The interior extends the organic theme with wood, soft textiles and glass, while the ceiling is a wave of Douglas fir beams hung withchandeliers made up of around 30,000 incandescent test tubes.

Resumé

Jordan Mozer and Associates

1991Vivere restaurant, Chicago

1992Cypress Club restaurant, San Francisco

1993Stars restaurant, FrankfurtSurf ‘n’ Turf restaurant, Matsuyama, JapanThe Tempest restaurant, Houston

1994Américas restaurant, Houston

1995Mad 61 & Fred’s restaurants at Barney’s, New YorkIridium restaurant, New York

1996 Cheesecake Factory restaurant, Chicago

1997 Hudson Club restaurant & wine bar, ChicagoCoco Pazzo Café, ChicagoH2O Plus Office and Lab, ChicagoRolling Stones tour conceptual studies

1997–8Bellagio Hotel bars, restaurants & stores, Las Vegas

1998Absolut Mozer for Absolut Design Series

Disney Quest entertainment centre, OrlandoMythos restaurant at Universal Studios, OrlandoVenetian Hotel stores, Las Vegas Outer Circle Products office & factory, Chicago

1999XS restaurant & entertainment centre, OrlandoAllegro Hotel, Chicago

2000 Children’s Museum, Cylinder Restaurant & storefor Volkswagen’s Autostadt, Wolfsburg Trend Hotel Expo, HanoverLebensart Exhibition, Berlin

2001Nectar Lounge at Bellagio Hotel, Las Vegas

2002–03Karstadt department store prototype, Dusseldorf

2003‘Now’s the Time’ sculpture at Bellagio Hotel, LasVegasRoyal Hotel, MiamiHerzblut café & club, HamburgAsprey & Garrard store, London

2003–04Mikado, Anna Mae & Porthouse restaurants atBeau Rivage Resort, Las Vegas

2004‘Music Paintings’, Jordan Mozer watercolourexhibition, Carl Hammer Gallery, ChicagoWow Bao restaurant, Chicago

Canter’s Deli at Treasure Island, Las VegasBangkok Joe restaurant, Washington DCMarsh Grocery store prototype

2005 East Hotel, Hamburg (Best Interior Design,European Hotel Design Awards 2005; Best HotelDesign finalist, Gold Key Awards 2005)GGP City, Arizona

2006 Copper Bleu restaurant, MinneapolisGamba Ristorante, Merrillville

117+

GGP City, Arizona, 2005JMA’s signature of enveloping curvaceous forms istaken to the extreme in a design for a retail cityfor General Growth Properties in Arizona. Onceagain, there is a specifically American, filmicnarrative to the design, establishing the idea of abold new future in a frontier, desert setting. JordanMozer is acutely aware that he has a socialresponsibility to the visitors to his retail andrestaurant enterprises. This city design suggeststhat he could carry through his narrative,experiential ideals into the arena of permanentplace-making.

Jordan Mozer and Associates: Jordan Mozer (left)and Jeff Carloss (right). In 2006 they were joinedby a new partner, architect Tom Rossiter.