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
19 QUEENS MUSEUM EXPANSION COMPETITIONDOC 234—34/2
2001
Queens, New York
306090: Shifting Infrastructures, Farish Gallery,
Rice University, Houston, Texas
Gnuform
Principals:
Jason Payne
Heather
Roberge
Queens Museum Expansion Competition
QUEENS MUSEUM OF ARTRHYTHMIC CORRELATION
The organizational lines of the roof, stepped surface, and structural suspension net resonate visually and experientially. Thisrhythmic correlation between elements generates shifting specificities within the spaces of the building, activating its surfaces.Layered synchronicities work to blend and blur the distinctions between art objects and events, the exhibition infrastructure in placeto display them, and the Museum visitors themselves. The same structures that modulate the movement of people also affect artisticexpression, invigorating and extending the acts of exhibition and observation.Part of the problem of the “white box” as applied to museum design is more fundamental than that of its privileging certain formsand periods of art over others. Aside from these affiliations, the white box has also come to symbolize solitary reflection and passiveconsumption ofart, promoting a kind of alienation of the individual from the very masses the museum seeks to collect. We feel thatit is possible and, in fact, necessary to avoid this form of alienated collectivity in favor of more open and dynamic forms of publicgathering. Changing cultural sensibilities, more diverse museum-going demographics, and new forms of art and performance demanda built environment that integrates and amplifies the physical and social relations between people.
DEVELOPMENT - OCTOPUS
Working in tandem with Arup Los Angeles to develop a viable suspended roofscape we produced a detailed modelthat came to be known as the Octopus for the sucker-like pores on its underbelly. The relatively smooth surfacedeveloped during the competition isdeveloped using finite element analysis to determine its complex structuralcondition. This information allows us to divide the surface into tiles of varying depths, each of which holds astructural pin of precise and differing length. Strung together attheir outer end with a steel cable net in tensionand at their inner ends with a steel grid in compression, the assembly forms a taught sandwich closelyapproximating the real structural forces flowing through the roof.Materials: 1/32” PETG plastic (painted,) 1/8” chromed steel, anodized aluminum tube, aluminum rod, steel rodTechniques: Vacuum-forming (tiles,) water-jet cutting (steel grid,) manual tube-and rod-bending (pins and cablenet)Dimensions: 16” x 84” x 1”
DEVELOPMENT - BLOWFISH
This model studies the visual effects of massing with an eye toward the generation of atmosphere. Formalcomposition, normally the subject of massing studies, here is secondary to the thick visual ambiance created by thepulled surface. Shadow effects are studied in white (above,) then the model was coated with a metallic finish toexamine lighting qualities such as reflectivity and luminosity. While this object stands on its own as a test bed forspecific conditions, it also informs the more refined tectonic condition of the Octopus.Materials: White 3D print powder, nickel-silver finish coat (not shown)Techniques: Digital modeling, 3D printingDimensions: 7” x 21” x 3
“
DEVELOPMENT - STRUCTURAL SYSTEM
The suspension net covers an area 206 feet wide by 534 feet long with spiral strand cables suspended betweeneighteen pairs ofcolumns 149 feet apart. The cables have a sag to span ratio of 1:3 to 1:15 depending on its location. This is similar to a suspensionbridge only here the cable is underneath the floor surface. Each transverse cable truss has eleven struts and a curved top chord.This curved top chord takes its shape from the pleated surface above while the bottom cable takes a catenary shape. The lateralforce at each end of the cable span is resisted by diagonal cables in both directions. Each main cable has two anchor cables tied topile caps to resist uplift forces. The surface is formed by welding steel plate with stiffeners to the top chords. This allows the surfaceto work together as a whole, greatly increasing the stiffness of the structural system. The rigid shell provides strength while thesuspension net prevents deflection and limits vibration.