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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09 RASPBERRY FIELDS DOC 234—34/2
2008
Round Valley, Utah
Matters of Sensation Exhibition, Artist Space,
New York, New York
Raspberry Fields
Funk is not
what is scripted
Or what is
expected…
It is what
is felt.
-Al
Sharpton on James Brown, 2007
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.
The long
axis of the building is oriented at approximately 30° off of the east-west
direction such that its southwest façade faces directly into prevailing winter
storms as well as the southerly solar exposure. For this reason, the southwest
side of the building has weathered significantly, having seen over a century of
freeze-thaw dynamics. The northeast side, however, has remained nearly
perfectly preserved. The effects of weathering (or lack thereof) are captured
in the shape, texture, and color of the original wood cladding and shingles. On
the northeast side all is in order, while on the southwest side the wood planks
have curled with such force as to pry the nails from the studs and the shingles
have long since blown away. Similarly, the protected side remains a deep, even
brown, while the weathered side has become wildly striped with all manner of
browns, blacks, greys, and even moments of bright greens and oranges where
lichen have found purchase in the tortured surface. All of this is to say that
this structure, while formally an exercise in perfect symmetry is phenomenally
something quite different. In terms of both material dynamics and affective
disposition the two faces could not be more different.
The design
for the renovation and restoration of this building stems from this synthesis
of solid formal symmetry and radical affective bipolarity. The work seeks to
reinforce and amplify this pre-existing dichotomy from both directions. The
design of the interior becomes a nuanced play of symmetry-making and breaking,
with certain elements aligning along the strong central axis or aligning
against the two flanking edges, while others move off-axis in the age-old
compositional play that pits idiosyncrasy against balance. In contrast to the
formal-geometrical project of the interior, the design of the exterior
addresses the affective material qualities of wood subjected to various degrees
of weathering. The entire building is re-clad in wood shingles that, in the
beginning, are all the same: 4” by 24” (with 12” exposed face) by ½” thick
cedar stained a deep, almost black purple. On the day construction is complete,
the building’s massing and cladding will appear to be relatively flat,
monolithic, self-similar, and more optically absorptive than reflective. Over
time, however, the object’s material and contextual bipolarity will be
revealed, not only through the expression of natural weathering on the two
different sides, but through an accelerated process brought about by unusual
detailing. The long, slender shingles are attached intentionally improperly,
with the bottom ends unfixed and the grain oriented more horizontally than
vertically. This encourages premature curling of the kind already seen in the
existing southwestern façade, only much worse due to the “impropriety” of the
shingles. Adding to the drama, the undersides of the shingles on this side are
stained much more brightly than the dark topsides, ranging in color from orange
to purple to match the four colors of raspberry species indigenous to the site.
Thus, when the shingles begin to curl their undersides reveal a flamboyance
that is in marked contrast to the darkened reserve of the initial skin. Over
many years it is hoped that the shingles on the exposed side take on the
character of fur, growing slightly fuller with each season. Meanwhile, the
northeast side – the only façade subjected to local scrutiny due to the
orientation of the building on the site – will remain reasonably straight and
composed.