HIRSUTA ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH AND DESIGN
Principal, Hirsuta LLC

Associate Professor of Architecture, UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design


Jason Payne has worked as project designer for Reiser + Umemoto/RUR Architects and Daniel Libeskind Studio and co-partnered the award winning office Gnuform, best known for the NGTV Bar (2006 AIA Design Award) and the 2006 P.S.1 entry “Purple Haze.” With the launch of his new office, Hirsuta, Payne continues to promote a new materialism with a distinctly sensate bias. Informed by intensive research and an experimental approach, his work engages material dynamics in the production of form to create a direct appeal to the senses.


With his previous office, Gnuform, and his new office, Hirsuta, Payne has established a reputation as a leading designer in his generation. Hirsuta pursues both built and speculative projects, generally in the small to medium-scale range. The office is a full service architectural, interior, landscape, and object design firm specializing in advanced form and the integration of emerging technologies in construction, committed to the synthesis of research and practice. This work has been reviewed in a wide variety of publications and he received a 2006 AIA Design Award for his NGTV Bar in Beverly Hills. He was a finalist in the MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Competition in 2006 with his entry, “Purple Haze,” and also participated in the 2006 Architecture Beijing Biennial, among other distinctions. His work of recent years is credited as being a major influence in pushing digital design and fabrication away from an overt focus on technique and process toward the explicit celebration of product, experience, affect, and atmosphere. Jeff Kipnis has referred to Payne as a “new breed of phenomenologist” for his turn away from virtual environments toward an emphasis on material dynamics and sensation. Payne is also known in the context of a group of Los Angeles designers committed to fabrication and construction, continuing that city’s long-standing tradition of realized experimentation. 


Payne considers his work part of an emerging “vitalist-materialist” model for architectural production that privileges the role of matter in the design process. Traditionally, matter in architecture has been understood as secondary to organization, its shape beholden to underlying and essential diagrams. For Payne, there is no pre-existing diagrammatic condition. Diagrams and their progeny, organizations, are secondary and emergent, culled from the play of matter and energy in space and time. Matter first, organization second. Ultimately, this way of thinking leads to an architecture of effective atmospheres. In his words, “we are ever more a species that thrives on immediate, sensual stimulation and material fact. It is not what it is so much as how it feels, and one of the things we feel most potently in buildings is their atmosphere. Therefore, maintaining and extending the public role of buildings demands more than that they be merely looked at; they must produce a saturated experience so that they almost cling to the skin of the people moving through them.”


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01   Saline Dreams: Best Available Control Measures 


These images examine the engineered ecology and resultant aesthetic implications of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s Dust Mitigation Project at Owens Lake, California with an eye toward its aesthetic implications and potential for understanding large scale landscape design in the Anthropocene. Imagined here is a near-future evolution of this infrastructure toward strange new landscapes, turning radically empirical environmental geoengineering techniques toward an emergent, more expansive aesthetic dimension.

Read more2024 
Book forthcoming




02  Ambivalent House


First Place finish

Stranger things have happened on Mulholland Drive. Like the Chemosphere before it, this house pushes hard on the envelope of experimental residential design. A spheroid floating low to the ground on a single column, the form is the anexact offspring of more geometrically perfect round houses already achieved. It rotates, too, like Foster’s Roundhouse, but much more slowly, perhaps over the course of a year or more. In this way, the house’s many faces continually recombine visually to produce new profiles and elevations, an ever-changing, ambivalent object. The iconicity that is inevitable of an experimental house on this site is challenged, then, by its resistance to ever being viewed or read the same way twice. 

Read more2019 
Los Angeles, California
Arch Out Loud Last House on Mullholand Competition  (online)




03  Ida (and Dactyl)  


Our design of a rock for a picturesque landscape begins with two impulses. The first involves decontextualizing the rock if only for the reason that an un-decontextualized rock is just a rock, eliminating any need for design. The second involves darkening the rock so that it might hide once again within the reticence of rockness. For most of us rocks are hard to know and this quality is a central feature of this object. Thus a paradox: how to work both with and against the nature of a rock at the same time. . .a developed and conscientious ambivalence in both method and outcome.

Read more2016-2017 
The Kid Gets Out of the Picture Exhibition, 
Materials & Applications
Gallery, Los Angeles,  California




04  Studies for Asteroids in a Picturesque Landscape


Our design of a rock for a picturesque landscape begins with two impulses. The first involves decontextualizing the rock if only for the reason that an un-decontextualized rock is just a rock, eliminating any need for design. The second involves darkening the rock so that it might hide once again within the reticence of rockness. For most of us rocks are hard to know and this quality is a central feature of this object. Thus a paradox: how to work both with and against the nature of a rock at the same time. . .a developed and conscientious ambivalence in both method and outcome.

Read more 2016-2017   
The Kid Gets Out of the Picture Exhibition, Graduate School of Design Gallery, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

05  Mathilde: Low Albedo


Asteroids are profoundly closed objects, their observation possible only from without and from afar. In this way their relation to us is one of constant recession, a turning away, a deep ambivalence to our ever knowing them. But what if one were to let us in, to let us see it from the inside? This project imagines asteroid 253 Mathilde turned outside-in, making space of the object. An impulse to construct a very strange and dark form, Mathilde: Low Albedo initiates a new foray into the old problem of the subject-object relationship. In the context
of MOCA’s Contemporary Architecture From Southern California exhibition this seems wholly reasonable; after all, the impulse to create unorthodox form surely must be the deepest link that ties the otherwise heterogeneous cohort that is this show’s cast of characters.

Read more2013 
Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles, California




06  Variations on the Disco Ball


There may be no other architectural object simultaneously so powerful in effect yet so dismissed by our discourse than the disco ball. In terms of effective “bang for the buck” - an increasingly vital criterion by which to judge design value in these difficult economic times - nothing else compares. Think about it: a sphere as small as a basketball covered in cheap mirrored glass tiles hung from a ceiling can throw off an amount of optical effects sufficient to drive a dance floor into a frenzy. Not to mention its more diffusive power to turn the course of popular taste from folksy trips through dropout hippy fantasy (or its darker flip-side, the heavy slog through a metallic wasteland) toward something clearly brighter and more productive. 

Read more2011 
House Party of the Future Exhibition, Land Of Tomorrow Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky



07  On the Turning Away: Crater 308


First Place finish


Daedalus Crater lies on the far side of Earth’s Moon at 5.9˚ S, 179.4˚ E, measuring 93 km in diameter and 3.0 kilometers in depth. Near its center lies the location on the Moon measuring the furthest point from Earth’s surface and, given the Moon’s synchronous orbit about Earth, firmly resists ever knowing its host planet. 


Read more2011
The Moon
SuckerPunch (online)



08  Rawhide


Etiam euismod elit id nisl lacinia commodo. Donec non neque quis mauris malesuada ultricies. Sed posuere sem velit, nec vestibulum enim laoreet a. Duis imperdiet egestas pulvinar, In gravida turpis arcu, et semper nisl pellentesque est.

Read more2011 
Round Valley, Utah
Southern California Institite of Architecture Gallery, Los Angeles, California

09  Raspberry Fields


Matters of Sensation

This project is a full renovation and restoration of an existing, one-room schoolhouse built in northern Utah in the early 1900’s. Used as a school into the 1920’s, the structure was then used sporadically to store grain through the 1950’s, after which time it was abandoned for any formal use. Despite this decades-long lack of utility, the building has stood as a reminder to the local ranching community of their origins in this difficult, remote part of the country. Over the years, through seasons of hard winters and hot summers, the structure has remained straight, unbroken, and - true to its original design - absolutely bilaterally symmetrical. Or so it would seem.

Read more2008 
Round Valley, Utah
Matters of Sensation Exhibition, Artist Space, New York, New York

10  Kearl Residence


Private Commision

This project is a full renovation and restoration of an existing, one-room schoolhouse built in northern Utah in the early 1900’s. Used as a school into the 1920’s, the structure was then used sporadically to store grain through the 1950’s, after which time it was abandoned for any formal use. Despite this decades-long lack of utility, the building has stood as a reminder to the local ranching community of their origins in this difficult, remote part of the country. Over the years, through seasons of hard winters and hot summers, the structure has remained straight, unbroken, and - true to its original design - absolutely bilaterally symmetrical. Or so it would seem.

Read more2007 - 
Round Valley, Utah




11  Legere-Munson Residence


Private Commision

 

Read more2009 
Minneapolis, Minnesota




12  Freeman Residence


Private Commision

A house for a window  

Read more2011 
Monterey Park, California

13  Purple Haze: MoMA/PS1 Competition Entry


2006 PS1 Finalist Exhibition
MoMA PS1 Young Architects’ Program, 
[juried selection]

Named for Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 classic Purple Haze, our project creates altered sensory states similar to those suggested in his lyrics and the mythology surrounding this song. Primarily corporeal rather than conceptual, our proposal produces these altered states with vast fields of potent colors combined with pronounced optical, tactile, auditory, olfactory, and even taste effects.  

Read more2006 
Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York




14  Green Medium: Vertical Garden


Vertical Garden, MAK Austrian Museum of
Applied Arts, Vienna 
[juried selection]

•di•umn. 1. An intervening substance through which something else is transmitted or carried on 2. The substance, oftennutritive, in which a specific organism lives and thrives 3. A substance regarded as the means of transmission of a force or effect 4.A surrounding or enveloping substance

Read more2006 
MAK Center for Art and Architecture, 
West Hollywood, 
California




15  Malibu House


Private Commision

The familiar topological curiosity of the Klein Bottle is a natural place to begin developing an involuted spatiality. Asurface that literally turns itself inside-out, the structure gradually moves away from this original model towardorganizations increasingly influenced by the realities of the project. Layered involutions are created by draping thebottle in a structural net.

Read more2005 
Malibu,  California




16  Man-o-war Installation


Named for the sea creature it resembles, the Man-O-War is a gallery installation meant to produce a thickened atmosphere of matter and light. Designed for an exhibition featuring architectural design and research involving hirsute (hairy) morphology, the piece hovers midway between floor and ceiling like a heavy storm front. Its global mass emerges from the accumulated material dynamics of 15,300 green, yellow, and blue monofilament lines of various weights, lengths, and curl parameters suspended from weighted points. The mass varies in opacity, color and shape as it responds to changes in the physical environment around it.
 
Read more2004 
UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban
Design, Los Angeles, California
Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture, Columbus, Ohio




17  Highline Competition


We propose that the Highline be developed as a catalyst for a new form of urbanism. More than the adapted reuse of the narrow train track and the space immediately below, this project projects a broader band of variegated frequencies into the city through which it flows.

Read more2004 
New York, New York



18  NGTV Bar


2006 AIA LA Design Awards, Southern California
Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles 
[juried selection]

Designed as part of a larger project for the new No Good TelevisionTM Headquarters in Beverly Hills, the private bar is the heart of a heavy, sensual atmosphere created throughout the building using rich color and light. Materials, effects, and techniques used more sparingly in other areas of the project come together in the bar to form an enriched core. 

Read more2001 
Beverly Hills, California




19  Queens Museum Expansion Competition


The organizational lines of the roof, stepped surface, and structural suspension net resonate visually and experientially. This rhythmic correlation between elements generates shifting specificities within the spaces of the building, activating its surfaces. Layered synchronicities work to blend and blur the distinctions between art objects and events, the exhibition infrastructure in place to display them, and the Museum visitors themselves. 

Read more2001 
Queens, New York
306090: Shifting Infrastructures, Farish Gallery, Rice University, Houston , Texas

20  Hollywood Hills Studio


Private Commision

The client, an acting coach and fine art collector, requested an existing space to be expanded and outfitted with cabinetry to accommodate several programs that when individually optimized exceeded the space available. By understanding the individual functions as dependent on the mechanics of one another, we were able to massage each to work in relation to the others. Specifically,the sculptural storage cabinets accommodate the media viewing equipment and the storage closet absorbs the sofa and a slot windowto the exterior. The space constraints demanded that we design the cabinetry as pliant and reconfigurable. This allows large quantitiesof art storage, a video screening area, office space and household storage to occupy one relatively small space.  

Read more2003 
Hollywood, California



21  Jonathan’s Room


Private Commision

An avid reader, eight-year-old Jonathan Meed asked us to create a space in which he could retreat to thefantastic landscapes of his books. Inspired by Maurice Sendak's classic Where The Wild Things Are©, we created a space of textured and crenelated surfaces, washed in the greens and blues of worlds far away fromthat of the Roosevelt Island apartment just outside his door.

Read more2000 
New York, New York