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

2024 
Book forthcoming
Project Team:
  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.



Owens Lake: Halophilic Anthropocene

Owens Lake, in the eastern California high desert bordering southwestern Nevada, is not so much a lake as it is a lakebed, a largely dry, nearly flat expanse of alkaline soil and shallow saltwater flooding measuring 108 square-miles. It has been this way since 1913, the year William Mulholland’s Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) completed the Los Angeles Aqueduct and began diverting water from the Owens River, the lake’s primary source of water, to Los Angeles, 200 miles to the west. Prior to this, Owens Lake was a pristine subalpine lake with depths averaging 23 to 50 feet, with shoreline habitat for migrating waterfowl. In just over a decade following the aqueduct’s water extraction efforts water levels dropped drastically - now better measured in inches rather than feet - leaving vast areas of exposed playa, the desiccated soils of which contain a variety of minerals that are toxic to humans and wildlife. High winds endemic to the Owens valley took these toxins airborne as recurrent dust storms, poisoning surrounding settlements, sometimes hundreds of miles distant. Increasing pressure to remedy this state of affairs grew over decades until the year 2000 in which LADWP finally initiated a project at the lake that would control its airborne pollution, a project for dust mitigation that is planned to continue in perpetuity.



The radical transformation of Owens Lake created by the LADWP to fuel the otherwise impossible urban growth of Los Angeles is still managed by LADWP and has become the most well-known indication of LA’s extraordinary impact on the pre-modern natural world. The toxicity of its airborne mineral effluents ranks among the world’s most recognizable ecological mistakes and is clearly visible from space. But for all of this, and refraining momentarily from seeing it for the colossal human-induced (un)natural disaster that it is, Owens Lake might be imagined as a study in fluid motion, a gigantic painterly palette of minerals and fluids pushed and pulled to slake an elsewhere thirst. Its colors and patterns are of stunning beauty, changing day to day and year to year in response to natural, seasonal fluctuations of temperature, biochemistry, wind and rain as well as to continually evolving remediation efforts developed through human engineering. Improved dust mitigation techniques implemented each year render the complexion of the playa different all the time, never to be imagined or mapped the same way twice. Images from space reveal a striking palette of reds, pinks, grays and greens in synthetic whorls and bands of color and pattern both strikingly specific and clearly unnatural in form. Places like this do not naturally occur. Photographed from above it is an album of fluid motion continually in flux.





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