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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13 P.S.1
MoMA YOUNG ARCHITECTS PROGRAM
DOC 234—34/2
2006
Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
Gnuform
Principals:
Jason Payne
Heather
Roberge
Purple Haze: MoMA/PS1 Competition Entry
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.
Purple
Haze is stratified into several horizontal layers that behave like oceanic
currents: each is distinct yet relies upon its neighbors for support and
differentiation. Moving from the ground up, these layers are comprised of
supple, toroidal loungers with wading pools, fog, mist and rain, a pleated,
perforated shade canopy, and steel structural cables.
Our
project aims to please in truest sense of the phrase. The creation of pleasure
of the senses is paramount, thus our emphasis on how things feel and how the
look of things feels, rather than how things look. As waves of sensory stimuli
pass through a crowd, individual bodies congeal into cohesive forms. Through
shared pleasure comes a contemporary form of community.
Ultimately,
this way of thinking leads to an architecture of effective atmospheres. 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 architecture is its atmosphere. Therefore, maintaining
and extending the public role of architecture demands more than that it be
merely looked at; it must produce a saturated experience such that it clings to
the skin of the people moving through it.
P.S.1
MoMA Young Architects Program 2006 SENSATION
…Purple haze all around…imagine the growling feedback of Hendrix’s
guitar as he sings that line. Such is the swirling, purple haze of mist
suspended in the air, cooling the unified skin of the crowd during each
Saturday’s Warm Up. A blanket of mist produced by overhead emitters thickens
the atmosphere such that it becomes both visible and tangible (and even
olfactory if we scent the water with the essence of various flowers.) Two
separate plumbing infrastructures create two distinct environmental experiences:
mist and rain. The triangular gallery contains mist that grows from light to
heavy as one moves northward. The rectangular gallery contains intermittent
rain except over the loungers, bar, and perimeter. Visitors may engage this
room to varying degrees, from passive observation at the edges to playing in
the rainfall (umbrellas labeled “P.S.1” are provided.)
…s’cuse me while I kiss the sky…An extensive canopy creates shade and
organizes all of the elements described above into a coherent order. Conceived
as a continuous surface, it spreads across the majority of both galleries and
pinches through the doorway at their interface. Longitudinal pleats produce an
easy, elegant compression and extension and generate a variegated visual
rhythm. The ridges of the pleats align with suspension cables above and
plumbing below. Constructed of long bands of perforated, vinyl-coated mesh
fabric, the canopy provides constant shade and blocks 80% of UV light. The band
of each pleat is also perforated at a larger scale, creating shafts of light
through the thickened atmosphere and dancing spots of light on the ground,
walls and loungers. The circular cuts of these holes are only partially cut,
leaving the material to hang down and flutter. In constant motion, the fuzzy
underside of the canopy blurs into the shifting atmosphere below. The
translucent vinyl’s purple and magenta coloration casts a purplish hue into the
space.