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.”