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.