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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15 MALIBU HOUSEDOC 234—34/2
2005
Malibu, California
Gnuform Principals:
Jason Payne
Heather Roberge
Malibu House
Commissioned by a retired couple in late 2004, this house occupies a difficult and contradictory site in the bluffs above Malibu overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Physically the site presents fewer difficulties than most of those in thesurrounding area: a large, flat building area, nearby utilities and road access with stunning views all around. Legally,however, the site is nearly impossible to develop. Located just a few hundred feet from the edge of a majorlandslide zone and in the path of frequent wildfires, the various planning bodies charged with the oversight of thisarea would like nothing more than to see it lie permanently fallow. Our project’s form follows in large part fromtheir exceedingly difficult constraints.Limited to the diminutive area, height, volume, and weight of the lightweight former house to occupy the site(burned down in a 1993 wildfire,) our structure nevertheless must meet all current building standards. Beyondthese, seismic, landslide, and fire codes all demand heavy increases to area, volume, and weight unless conceivedwith uncommon ingenuity. Our approach to resolving these requirements with challenging client desires has beenone of continual modeling of nuanced change similar to morphologist D’Arcy Thompson’s method for measuringminute variations in animal form. Images of a selection of these models follow.The general organization of the house consists of three parts: a wide, continuous that spirals upward from grade,an umbrella-like roof rising from the inner ring of the floorplate to flare outward, and a central core that forms aninterior courtyard. In the temperate California climate this internalized exterior space captures area and volumewithout spending valuable square footage and volumetric allotments. Similar involutions of the exterior in otherareas relieve the otherwise constrained envelope.This project is currently in design development and is scheduled to begin construction in 2009.
MALIBU HOUSEINITIAL MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
The familiar topological curiosity of the Klein Bottle is a natural place to begin developing an involuted spatiality. Asurface that literally turns itself inside-out, the structure gradually moves away from this original model towardorganizations increasingly influenced by the realities of the project. Layered involutions are created by draping thebottle in a structural net
MALIBU HOUSE DEVELOPMENTFORMThe collection of models on the following pages breaks into three general categories: form, structure, and skin.Formal models such as those above address the ways the difficult relationship between client desires and tighttechnical constraints impact organization. Between each model shown here are many more, each being a variationof greater or lesser degree on the last. Most delineate the form of the house as finely calibrated surfaces containinga fixed volume and area. Development from model to model allows these quantities to shift but never increase ordecrease due to strict limits on the project’s size: too small and we disappoint the client, too large and we violate planning statutes