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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06 VARIATIONS ON THE DISCO BALL OR, THE AMBIVALENT OBJECT

2011 
House Party of the Future Exhibition, Land Of Tomorrow Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky
Variations on the Disco Ball or, The Ambivalent Object


There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it’s all dark.

-Pink Floyd 1973


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. Whether you liked it or not, you have to admit that disco’s sweet light eclipsed all else for a few short years and, more importantly, has helped spawn a variety of new genres and sub-genres to this day. And at the center of it all, the disco ball.


Objects and Their Associations

Is it possible for an object with such distinct and established identity to blur its own associations toward novel readings? That is one question this project would ask. The problem of the floating signifier refers to the capacity for certain objects to carry different significations for various viewers. This is not a new problem for architecture or the arts, of course, but it is one having renewed potential for a discourse increasingly engaged in the pursuit of spectacle. What does it mean for a thing to be looked at? Should it always produce the same effect, or might it be more interesting (valuable, provocative, etc.) if a thing could produce a plurality of interpretations? We think the latter but first things first. In order to create a multivalent object one must first master the play of established associations and objects and what better exercise than to dislodge associations so singular and obstinate as those of the disco ball? Stated more simply, wouldn’t it be interesting to create a disco ball that somehow did not convey the imagery, ethics, and emotion of disco? And in their place...what?


The Ambivalence of Some Objects

As we know, some objects are not as well-defined as others in relation to established cultural perception. Mars and its moon Phobos, for example, are two objects useful to compare relative to their attendant associations. Each of the two heavenly bodies is morphologically as exact as the other, and yet we “know” far more about Mars than we do Phobos. It is true that we have looked at Mars more closely than we have Phobos, but this increased attention is not all there is to it. If we are honest we will admit that Mars has certain qualities we understand to be more certain, and more univalent, than those of Phobos. Its color, red, for example, seems more singular than the more ambiguous gray of Phobos. Its shape, too, the sphere, we think we know as well, whereas the less-perfect quasi-sphere of Phobos seems difficult, resistant. 


It might be that the creation of an object that floats across signification begins with the replacement of entrenched signifiers (red, sphere) with more obscure qualities that lend themselves to difficult, perhaps multiple readings. This project, then, aims to disrupt the disco ball’s cultural familiarity without damaging its performative capacity to push optical effects through space. In the same way we have just enough information to know Phobos is a planetoid but not enough to know what kind it is, our objects are just enough disco ball to be seen as such but not nearly enough to conjure the expected soundtrack. 


Planetesimal Principle 1: Not a Sphere (Not a Planet)

Phobos is an example of a kind of celestial body astrophysicists refer to as a planetesimal. Generally speaking, these objects fail to rise to the definitional category of “planet,” itself a contentious subject within planetary science. Without going into esoterica and in avoidance of the above-mentioned controversy, planets still correspond largely to the layperson’s understanding of their key attributes: they are relatively large objects in space, are round, and exhibit the more or less “regular” behaviors that large, round objects display in the world of Newtonian physics (they have orbits tied to the gravitational pull of even larger objects (usually) and rotate about their own axis in a singular way. Planetesimals, on the other hand, are things like planets that lack at least one fundamental defining characteristic. They may be quite small, for example, or have eccentric orbits or rotations, or be irregular in shape. In a word, they are less than ideal in some critical way and are thus relegated to the substratum of lesser objects in the universe. 


For purposes of this project comprised of deformed and disaffected disco balls, as well as its more general inquiry into the contemporary status of the object in architecture the planetesimal is taken as both conceptual starting point as well as literal primitive. In the same way that planetesimals refuse to straighten up and fly right, so too does the malformed disco ball. We begin by mining the internet for digital models of these objects, most of which are asteroids, many of them constructed to remarkable degrees of accuracy given the dearth of information gathered on them. This astonishing discovery itself - the apparent disproportionality between quantitative data measured (low) versus degree of geometrical description of the digital models (high) - became one of the working principles for the project. For it surely must be the case that these anexact yet rigorous models created by doctoral students of astrophysics cannot really be entirely true, and must instead be riddled with fictions. Our goal involves taking these models back around full circle by creating objects of exacting quantitative definition that carry vicarious, even ambivalent readings...like planetesimals themselves.


The initial models of asteroids we select are geometrically ambivalent, which is to say they are neither spherical nor are they not spherical. They are nearly spherical, and in so being may appear to be one or the other - round or irregular - depending on viewing distance and/or rotational speed. In this way we begin with a stacked deck, with primitives that already appear to hover between Platonic ideal and more prosaic organizations of real matter, something nearly spherical but not really. This is, after all, the essence of ambivalence - the desire to have it both ways at once.


Planetesimal Principle 2: Concavity’s Awkward Influence

As a general attribute ascribed to the category of form, concavity would seem to be nothing more or less than objective feature, the result of a surface inflected inward. Strangely this is often not the case. Instead, concavities in bodies frequently engender more focused, poignant reception than the indifference of geometry would suggest. Holes, folds, cleavages, dimples, craters...indentations of all sorts draw attention somehow different from that to be had from the fullness of convexity. However observational this claim may sound relative to any general theory of form, it certainly is true of planetesimal form. The unnerving presence of concavity is, in fact, among the primary morphological conditions responsible for so many astronomical bodies to be categorized as planetesimal. More specifically, it is a significant, measurable proportion of concavity to convexity across the mass of an object that is at stake. The greater the degree of indenture the more awkward and unseemly the object becomes...revealing an apparent revulsion on the part of the taxonomists of such bodies toward anything less than uniformly full.


Disco balls display this same vulnerability to the weirdness of indentation, an observation so intuitively obvious as to require no further argument. Suffice it to say that some of the strangest moments found in our disco balls are those places where the centrifugal impulse so dominant in the surfaces of spherical bodies is subverted by inflection.


Planetesimal Principle 3: Irregular Albedo

Albedo refers to the reflection coefficient, or brightness, of a surface. Relative to most other celestial bodies planetesimals have comparatively low albedo due to material composition, lack of atmosphere, and shadows induced by cratering. For example, asteroid 253 Mathilde is very nearly black. Specifically, its albedo measures as low as virtually any known object or material, reflecting only three percent of the Sun’s light. Twice as dark as charcoal, Mathilde’s elevational aspect is nearly that of space itself, making it extraordinarily difficult to see and photograph. Ambivalent, it would seem, to the traditional and dichotomous relationships of object to field, mass to volume, body to context. As it slowly rotates it presents a continually changing figure as its outer profile appears to slip away into the dark of space, making edges difficult to discern. A study in black, Mathilde presents real problems of representation for astrophysicists and architects alike since each is more accustomed to objects with more pronounced optics. The definition of an object indifferent to legibility suggests that standard, disciplinary means of representation be questioned and may very well require the development of new methods of visualization. Indeed, renderings for Planetesimal Series I often relied on the full range of seven different blacks available in the Pantone palette. 


Despite this tendency toward darkness, however, the protoplanets as a group exhibit a broad range of albedo, occasionally as high as Eris’ 0.96. Moreover, as might be imagined the irregular surfaces of such objects often create an irregular albedo, sometimes moving from very bright highlights to the darkest blacks. In the disco balls this pronounced variation in reflectivity plays out in dramatic fashion too, as each face competes with the next for attention. Some surfaces occlude neighboring faces while others combine effects in the manner of amplification. Surprising as it may sound given the irregularity of these objects, ensuing reflection patterns on surrounding surfaces is not incoherent. A striking level of rigor and compositional tightness results that moves away from the painterly wash of discrete points of light evenly spaced that comes of a standard disco ball toward decidedly more draughterly effects. Were Libeskind’s Chamberworks imagined as a planetarium laser show this might be the result. To be clear, these objects are not meant to function in a disco nor are optical effects the primary aim - they are very secondary to questions concerning the legibility of the form itself. Nevertheless, given the surprising (and delightful!) shift from such effects enhancing the background of a distracted audience to their more forceful projection onto the foreground of a concentrating subject, this subordinate line of enquiry seems worth exploring.


Planetesimal Principle 4: Elevational Ambivalence

Vaguely round objects present a fourth problem of disciplinary importance, that of elevational ambivalence. Seen through the lens of the conceptual and analytical tool known as the “developed surface” the issue becomes clear. Famously described by Robin Evans in his text “The Developed Surface: An enquiry into the brief life of an eighteenth century drawing technique” this underlying diagram is used often to compose, in its most typical form, interior elevations around a central plan. By extension this technique may be applied to exterior elevations, and in either case the resultant projection to two dimensional representation resembles something like an unfolded box. To work properly this method assumes two things: fundamental rectilinearity of geometrical rationale of the object, and unambiguous edges, or divisions between plan and elevation as well as between elevations themselves. Our objects break both of these rules. They are spheroidal, not cuboid, with regulating lines running latitudinally and longitudinally, one set of which converges at poles. Unfolding such objects is never the same as it is with boxlike forms, resulting instead in flayed patterns that distort each flattened surface such that they are no longer dimensionally equivalent to their original, unprojected state. If an architectural elevation is defined in part as a thing in which measure remains constant across projection from three to two dimensions then the patches of surface created by developing a spheroid are not really elevations at all. Moreover, these objects rarely have clear edges that indicate definitive difference between one area and the next. While they do have “edges” in the strict, technical sense of the term (such as those found in polygonal modeling) these are not the same as the corners found in rectilinear forms because they usually do not define the hard boundaries common to architectural elevations.


This lack of correspondence to our standard model for visualizing and defining the architectural elevation leads to uncertainty in the worst case but ambivalence in the best, the latter being a conscientious decision to identify transitions by other means. In tenebrism, for example, the outermost edges of objects are obscured by light and dark such that illumination itself becomes figural. Photographs of planetesimals have this quality as well, as do our disco balls. In this way, elevations are choreographed across objects in the round, sometimes adhering to geometrical cues such as cusps, bumps, and ridges but sometimes not. In any case the definition of an elevation is never automatic and instead involves a willful effort to wrestle a certain degree of clarity from ambiguity. 


Planetesimal Principle 5: Contextual Indifference

Asteroids and their kin are famously indifferent to context, at least locally. Popular depictions of asteroid fields such as that of the chase scene between the Millenium Falcon and hostile TIE Fighters in The Empire Strikes Back illustrate well the deep disinterest objects like these have toward whatever might be around them. A lack of concern borne of introversion rather than antagonism, the planetesimal’s sufficiency unto itself - its uniqueness - leaves little room for more extroverted contextual impulses. While some are held captive by larger, global influences exerted by massive celestial bodies they all still, at the local scales more relevant to architectural objects, move in their own individual ways. Were they sentient we would understand them to be shy to the point of autism. The cause of this withdrawn affect goes deeper than behavior, though, to the core of the object itself: its form. Roundish forms are inherently solitary due to the nature of centripetal geometry where forces pull inward rather than push outward. Quite naturally, then, outside observers read such forms as things unto themselves, detached from the stuff of the world around them.


Architecture’s reflexive insistence on reference to context has had altogether too long a run. What is the point, anyway? Efficiency of use by way of smooth connections between things? Collage practice alone should be enough to convince us how unnecessary are literal continuities between forms for their rationalization by an external viewer and besides, arguments for utility always privilege subject over object. This aside, even more disciplinary cases made for contextual affiliation’s influence on the shaping of form itself tends to distract our energies to the peripheries of things. David Ruy warns of these preoccupations with everything but the architectural object itself as leading to the sad endgame of architecture as “consequence.” A reference to the much larger and more pervasive consequentiality that develops from Kant’s “Copernican turn” in which all things are defined by their relationships to other things, Ruy argues that architecture’s habitual return to all manners of contextual reference undermines disciplinary integrity. 


Our initial run of five misshapen disco balls did not, unfortunately, anticipate the tendency for context to steal the show. Despite all of our design energy being focused on the objects themselves according to the principles outlined here, their exhibition in an expected format - inside a room, hung from the ceiling, slowly rotating, lit for maximum reflectivity onto surrounding walls, accompanied by rock music - reminded viewers of the very thing these objects were meant to challenge: the “disco ball” in all of its standard associations. As decorative devices used to enhance the atmosphere and subliminally help fuel parties it was near impossible for the more introspective work on form contained in each object to be seen. If the original intent was to combine select aspects of both disco balls and planetesimals to construct a new, third thing that was neither but still resonated in strange ways with both, the first showing of Planetesimal Series I leaned too hard toward disco.


This proved to be a learning experience. The purest expression of our indifference to context are the renderings themselves of the disco balls/planetesimals against a stark black background, or photographs of them against blank white walls that challenge expectations to do with optical effects. Thinking this was perhaps too easy, we also experimented with more complicated contexts and placement. First we created a series of renderings locating the objects on the Moon. Scale and situation were manipulated toward estranging the original objects from common associations. They are much larger here than disco balls - the size of supermassive buildings or even greater - but still far smaller than the Moon itself, ultimately frustrating the effort to know them according to size. Grounded rather than floating, they no longer bear any association with common contextual associations. This simple act of grounding an object with no inherent ground datum went far toward decontextualization, so our next effort locates this line more precisely. Mathilde: Low Albedo finds one of our objects once again in a gallery setting, this time placed on the floor and scaled to the size of a pavilion. Like a black igloo, the dark and irregular monolith sits mutely in an exhibition space and even has an opening something like a door. But why, the viewer must wonder, would one approach this mass in the first place? If this is the reaction then we have succeeded in freeing Mathilde from contextual responsibility, at least in any functional sense. After this came Ida, similar to Mathilde in its groundedness but required to “speak” to passersby of information to do with bus arrival times. It does as asked via subtly changing light effects linked to local transit monitoring systems but the form itself has nothing to do with any of this, detached as it is from such trivialities. And so it goes, each iteration in the series disengaging from contextual relations in its own way.


Toward Architectural Ambivalence

Ambivalence, in the original sense of this state of being, is a powerful posture for a thing to assume and is nothing to do with uncertainty or lack of commitment. The ambivalent object projects autonomy, though not necessarily along the tortured pathways of earlier efforts toward autonomous form seen in our discipline. Designers of such things, trained as we are to make form both accessible and meaningful, find ourselves in a curious position vis a vis these objects that are inevitably of our own imagination. After all, it is one thing to ponder the nature of existing objects, including architectural ones, according to a cosmology of estrangement suggested in the points above; quite another, however, to create an object that might somehow reflect the ambiguity contained therein. Whatever is entailed would likely start with a circumspect thought exercise that wonders about the kind of forms that might be borne through the acknowledgement of their refusal to be fully known. Problematizing the object in this way poses special difficulties for the architect whose discipline, at least in terms of methodology, assumes certainty of measure and completion of form. Our drawings and models attest to this and given their central role in our disciplinary life will not likely disappear, nor is that the suggestion here. Instead, it would seem to be a matter of the designer’s embrace of the mysterious autism of things. To be clear, the base condition of uncertainty is one thing, but the conscious awareness of this state of being is something more: ambivalence. To be ambivalent is to choose to be unclear, undecided, equivocal. It is the inscrutability that comes from withholding all that might otherwise be seen. The ambivalent object, then, must surely require much effort to create and maintain. Like a poker face, such impenetrability does not occur naturally and is instead the blankness of cunning artifice and cold calculation. On some level the ambivalent object is not an uncertainty at all, however opaque it may seem.



Credits

Design: Hirsuta LLC, Los Angeles, California
        Jason Payne, Principal
        Molly Munson, Project Designer
        Timothy Callan, Project Designer
        Lauren Rath, Project Designer



Fabrication: Parrish Rash & van Dissel (PR&vD), Lexington, Kentucky
        Drura Parrish, Principal
        Timothy Rives Rash II, Principal
        Bart van Dissel, Principal



Special Thanks: Pluto (never forget!), all things glam, and Sylvia Lavin