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.”
Email
02 AMBIVALENT HOUSE
2019
Los Angeles, California
Arch Out Loud Last House on Mullholand Competition (online)
Project team:
Jason Payne
Ambivalent House
Spheroid
A
figure resembling a sphere; an object of approximately spherical shape;
ellipsoid of revolution; an object that is somewhat round but not perfectly
round.
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.
Mechanical
Room
Utilities
tied to the urban grid such as water, waste, and gas run through the fixed
core, while electricity may be off-grid and rely solely on power generated by
the building’s photovoltaic skin.
Stranger
In a Strange Land
This
neighborhood surely ranks among the strangest in Los Angeles: a natural
landscape that seems both near and far, the world-famous sign that happened by
accident, a gigantic radio tower, and coyotes. Strangest of all are the people,
mostly strangers-cum-tourists to the site milling about the front of the house
to take photographs. In a case like this it seems best not to measure against
any of this context directly or on its terms, as if to compete with the sign
with yet another sign. Instead the house must be a thing apart from
these other things, in the same way they are themselves, in order to stand
among them.
Subliminal
Motion
A
progenitor of this house, Richard Foster’s Roundhouse (1968) rotates on a ball
bearing system between 5 and 26 times per day depending upon the occupant’s
desires. A similar system is imagined here to create even slower rotation.
Actual, live movement would not be discernible to the senses at all, instead
only to memory and habit. Were the rate of rotation set to not coincide with
seasonal change the house would never look the same on the same day twice,
renewing its visage endlessly.
Iridescence
and Environment
The
majority of the external building skin is clad in photovoltaic film, flexible
and panelized. Wrapping the entire form maximizes solar exposure and integrates
the solar energy system into the building in a most primary way. Rather than
attaching to the envelope, it is the envelope. Integral to the
architecture itself, the photovoltaic surface takes on aesthetic
responsibility. Its iridescence is striking, the play of colors and
reflectivity across elevations adding another dimension to the shifting formal/figural
effects happening at the same time but more slowly. Further, photovoltaic film
appears as both reflective and absorptive, lending a certain ambivalence to
concavities and convexities of the surface.
Centrifugal/Centripetal
The
ambivalent relationship between exteriority and interiority as an expression of
centripetal and centrifugal forces: one turns away as the other turns inward.
Feral
Landscape
Site
design embraces the feral quality of the Hollywood Hills landscape and makes
very little attempt to tame it. Very few landscapes resemble this one, at least
in categorical terms: not quite beautiful or even picturesque, and not sublime
either except under unusual meteorological conditions. There is a certain brazenness
to a landscape that mixes signposts and infrastructure with rocks and shrubs so
that each somehow becomes equal to the other, a flat ontology of things.