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.”
Email
17 HIGHLINE COMPETITIONDOC 234—34/2
2004
New York, New York
Gnuform Principals:
Jason Payne
Heather Roberge
Highline Competition
We propose that the Highline be developed as a catalyst for a new form of urbanism. More than the adapted reuse of the narrowtrain track and the space immediately below, this project projects a broader band of variegated frequencies into the city throughwhich it flows.Our proposal for the reuse of the Highline imagines a form of urbanism uniquely suited to complement the existing structure of theelevated track. Branching urbanism involves material organizations that grow laterally over time through simple, ramiformmechanics. Branching systems are distinct from more general networks because they possess a single, hierarchically dominant spineand clear directionality. Secondary and tertiary branches move out of the primary line, loosening its braids into a field. Smallertendrils are increasingly sensitive to surrounding local conditions as they move outward, and their redundancy produces flexibility innumbers. Their excess also allows them to act as larger groups rather than single elements producing the emergence of largerzones. These qualities bring with them a higher degree of organizational control, allowing designers, policy makers, and citizens topredict and steer the system toward a desirable configuration.We propose that the Highline be understood as the pre-existing spine of a potential ramiform urbanism poised to propagate newconditions now and in the future through limited expansion into the surrounding neighborhoods. This new form of urban designavoids the pitfalls of both master planning and ad hoc, piecemeal development while capitalizing on their strengths. From theformerit borrows the coherence of an identifiable organization, from the latter the flexibility of implementation over time as space andfunding becomes available. Like all healthy organisms, branching urbanism grows in fits and starts and adapts to a changingenvironment. This is not theoretical speculation. We believe this form of urbandesign possesses a pragmatism and manageabilitythat makes it both real and possible morphologically, fiscally, and politically.
HIGHLINE PROGRAM: CONSERVATORY FOR RARE AND EXOTIC PLANTS
For us, “multi-use” refers not to program but to movement, allowingfor a more focused programmatic proposal. While mostfundamentally our vision is of the Highline as an engine for dynamic pedestrian flow, the greenhouses contain a conservatoryto rivalthe botanical gardens in Brooklyn and Queens and as complement to the more conventional Conservatory in Central Park.Motivated both by the program brief and the surreal beauty of the existing wild grassland, this project emphasizes the role ofvegetation in urbanism.The major botanical gardens of New York are in the outer boroughs-Manhattan has only the Conservatory in Central Park. TheNew York Botanical Garden in Brooklyn is 250 acres, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden is 52 acres, while the Highline is only 6.7acres. In order to compete with these much larger parks wepropose a kind of botanical condensation: only rare and specializedplant types are included. Capitalizing on the pragmatic realization that our limited area doesn’t allow for widespread conventionalplanting, our interior gardens use the spatial compression of the narrow greenhouses to amplify the experience of the exotic.Further emphasis of the rarefied species occurs through the juxtaposition of the wild grasses currently growing on the Highline onthe other side of the glass. Moving through the greenhouses is to experience the untamed spontaneity of the grasses on one side,the highly cultivated plants on the other