California Dreaming (Architectural Design) [1 ed.] 9781119838357, 1119838355

Citation preview

Edited by Neil Spiller

02 | Vol 93 | 2023

CALIFORNIA DREAMING

02/2023

California Burning About the Editor

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Architecture’s Pyrocene Future Jill Stoner

Neil Spiller

Introduction

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The Golden State California’s Architectural Soul Neil Spiller

Backlot Suburbia

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A California Story Craig Hodgetts

Californian, The Third Way

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Max Kuo 24

Material Imageability

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The Architecture of Façades and Envelopes

Do Dream Landscapes Have Earthquakes?

Blaine Brownell

Printing the Picture Plane Imaging Scales Up David Freeland and Brennan Buck

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Nicole Meyer

Extra-disciplinary Dreams Journeys Into the Foothills Heather Flood and Aaron Gensler

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ISSN 0003-8504

Edited by Neil Spiller

ISBN 978 1119 838357

Housing the Unhoused

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102

Los Angeles Architects Rise to the Challenge Frances Anderton

Skin and Bones

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Pushing the Event Horizon Eva Menuhin

In the Mood for Love

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Chromophilia Unbound Jasmine Benyamin

The Picture and the Frame

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Understanding a Contested Landscape

— Neil Spiller

Grace Mitchell Tada

A Hands-on Conceptual Rigour

California has historically provided a fertile breeding ground for radical modes of architectural thinking, practice, and building

84 From Another Perspective

A Multi-scalar Approach

Morphosis Modelling

Neil Spiller

128

A Golden Anniversary

There’s Something in the Air Authorship, the Hand and the Machine

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Neil Spiller

Contributors

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Courtney Coffman

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EDITORIAL BOARD

Editorial Offices John Wiley & Sons 9600 Garsington Road Oxford OX4 2DQ

Denise Bratton Paul Brislin Mark Burry Helen Castle Nigel Coates Peter Cook Kate Goodwin Edwin Heathcote Brian McGrath Jayne Merkel Peter Murray Mark Robbins Deborah Saunt Patrik Schumacher Jill Stoner Ken Yeang

T +44 (0)18 6577 6868 Editor Neil Spiller Managing Editor Caroline Ellerby Caroline Ellerby Publishing Freelance Contributing Editor Abigail Grater Publisher Todd Green Art Direction + Design Christian Küsters CHK Design Production Editor Elizabeth Gongde Prepress Artmedia, London

Journal Customer Services For ordering information, claims and any enquiry concerning your journal subscription please go to www.wileycustomerhelp .com/ask or contact your nearest office. Americas E: [email protected] T: +1 877 762 2974 Europe, Middle East and Africa E: [email protected] T: +44 (0)1865 778 315 Asia Pacific E: [email protected] T: +65 6511 8000 Japan (for Japanesespeaking support) E: [email protected] T: +65 6511 8010 Visit our Online Customer Help available in 7 languages at www.wileycustomerhelp .com/ask

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Print ISSN: 0003-8504 Online ISSN: 1554-2769

Front cover Atelier Manferdini, Folds & Pleats II, 'Ink on Mirror' exhibition, Industry Gallery, Los Angeles, California, 2016. © Atelier Manferdini Inside front cover Alexis Rochas, Bruce Danziger and Bryant Place, Lightweaver, Coachella Festival, Indio, California, 2014. © Stereobot, photo Eiko Tsuchiya Page 1 Atelier Manferdini, Kaida Centre of Science and Design, Dongguan, China, 2019. Image courtesy of Elena Manferdini, UAP | Urban Art Projects and Rex Zou

Acknowledgement The Editor and Craig Hodgetts would like to thank Denise Bratton for her diligent work on this issue.

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ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN March/April

Volume

Issue

2023

93

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ABOUT THE

EDITOR NEIL SPILLER

California is still a vibrant force in current architectural circles, continuing to push boundaries and explore ideas. Neil Spiller has watched and participated in this culture over the last 35 years. Neil is the Editor of 2, Visiting Professor of Architecture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and was Visiting Professor at IAUV Venice in 2021. He was previously Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, London. Prior to this he was Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Construction and Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory at Greenwich, and Vice-Dean and Graduate Director of Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL). In 2002 he was the John and Magda McHale Fellow at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He has guest-edited eight 2 issues, including the highly successful Architects in Cyberspace I and II (1995 and 1998), and more recently edited the issues Emerging Talents: Training Architects (July/August 2021) and Radical Architectural Drawing (July/August 2022). His books include Architecture and Surrealism (Thames & Hudson, 2016). He is also the author of How to Thrive in Architecture School: A Student Guide (RIBA, 2020). His architectural design work has been published and exhibited worldwide. He is an internationally renowned visionary architect and has been architecturally speculating with drawing for four decades. He is also known as the founding director of the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research (AVATAR) group, which conducts research into the impact of advanced technologies such as virtuality and biotechnology on 21st-century design. He is also recognised internationally for his paradigmshifting contribution to architectural discourse, research/ experiment and teaching. 1

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Image © Robbie Munn

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INTRODUCTION NEIL SPILLER

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CALIFORNIA’S ARCHITECTURAL SOUL

Slim Aarons, Poolside Gossip, 1970 This photograph of the Richard Neutra-designed Kaufmann House, Palm Springs, built in 1946–7, depicts a typical mid-century modern scene. Its residents and poolside visitors are living the California dream – gossiping, drinking and sun-worshipping against a backdrop of modernist splendour.

California has long been a frontier state, one that has attracted pioneers, inventors, moguls, musicians, directors and actors amongst a panoply of creative and entrepreneurial characters. Its always sunnily obliging weather and its optimism and energy help to define the concept of the ‘American Dream’ – the abiding myth that everyone can do well whatever their creed and upbringing. This 2, by its nature, is not big enough in space to cover this extraordinary state in all its architectural aspects and detail, but will set the historic context and delve into some recent innovative architects’ work, taking us on a journey that reflects the wider creative climate of the area. Sandwiched metaphorically between the creative maelstroms of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, contemporary Californian architects and designers have a milieu of talent, preoccupations and virtual techniques at hand from which to draw inspiration. There is much experimentation in the architectural profession itself, and many crossover interdisciplinary research and emerging spatial propositions exploiting film, animation, digital fabrication, performance and philosophy. There is, equally, a fecund culture of pushing the boundaries within architecture schools, where many of the more interesting protagonists in the profession teach as well as simultaneously nurturing their practices. The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley); the California College of the Arts in Oakland; the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Southern California (USC) and Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), all in Los Angeles; Woodbury University in Burbank and San Diego; as well as California State Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo and Pomona – all have a presence in the area. This issue features established architects who remain at the cutting edge of the profession and the educational realm.

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Going to California California has historically provided a fertile breeding ground for radical modes of architectural thinking, practice and building. From the 1920s onwards, this was sparked by the presence of eminent émigré architects Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, among many others, then the epochal influence of John Entenza’s ingenious editorship of Arts & Architecture in Southern California from 1940 to 1967 which launched the seminal postwar Case Study Houses programme (1945–66); the influential multidisciplinary practice of Charles and Ray Eames (1943–88), epitomised by their own Case Study House #8 (1949); the birth of ‘cool’ mid-century modernism (which would have an impact on architecture around the world); and programmes like Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) launched in 1967. Opening this 2 issue, architect, practitioner and teacher Craig Hodgetts explores this rich history and discusses the California context. From then on we zigzag across the state, often oscillating between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and venturing to assess architectural education in San Diego. One of the most interesting architectural offices in Los Angeles, producing some audacious work, is Synthesis Design + Architecture (SDA)|, founded and headed up by Alvin Huang, who is also Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. UCLA lecturer Max Kuo describes the practice's recent work and design philosophy. Continuing our cross-state journey we move on to the Bay Area and the Oakland-based practice Faulders Studio: Blaine Brownell, Director of the School of Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, looks at work that concerns itself with façade wraps formed by highly articulated elevational treatments and cladding systems that create arresting urban architectural presences. Back to LA and we are ushered into the SCI-Arc Gallery for ‘Views from the Field’, an exhibition by FreelandBuck – guided artfully around the installations by architects David Freeland and Brennan Buck themselves. The show explores the distortion of our cone of vision, using architectural illusion, multiplicity and varying points of view, corners and angles. Returning to Oakland and UC Berkeley Professor Jill Stoner contributes a poetically written piece concerning itself with architecture of the natural environment and its dependence on the rejuvenation caused by wildfires and the wisdom of Californian trees. Flying back to LA, writer and archivist Nicole Meyer takes a look at the recent output of Preliminary Research Office, a young practice bringing an individual and identifiable formal lexicon to its projects.

Tighe Architecture, Twin Villa, Beijing, China, 2022 This residential proposal illustrates how far and international the architectural influence of California stretches. Its architects propose and build buildings all over the world and have a great influence on global architectural discourse and fashion.

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Disrupting the Paradigm In a swerving motion we then slide down to San Diego, to Woodbury University (disrupting our previous alternating geographical rhythm), to take the opportunity to inspect and be thrilled by recent architectural propositions that cross disciplinary boundaries utilising flatware, porcelain and painting. We are shown around by Interim Dean of the School of Architecture Heather Flood and Architecture Chair Aaron Gensler who discuss the ethos of the school. Returning to Oakland to explore the work of landscape architect Walter Hood and his firm Hood Design Studio, we

see how the practice has created a series of spaces and interventions that are predicated on provoking equity and social value for diverse communities without sacrificing natural beauty or perceptual pleasure. Landscape writer and journalist Grace Mitchell Tada opens our eyes to the studio’s aspirations and some of its successes. Architectural practitioners and teachers Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, who are currently designing a number of highly dynamic buildings and interventions, comment in an interview on the history of their LA-based office and a few of its high points, expressing their interest in the

notion of scale and its multivalence, and reflecting on the melting pot of LA architectural discourse, rivalries and culture. We stay in and around LA as this issue draws to a close. Princeton University School of Architecture’s Courtney Coffman examines the work of the BallNogues Studio – a practice that explores the nexus between architecture, art and industrial design with an emphasis on making and craft but utilising digital fabrication methods and other opportunities of construction enabled by computers and software.

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Recent Developments Since the 1990s the Californian scene has been dominated by a fairly small coterie of architects, who by now are deep into their careers. They have reaped numerous awards and gained international fame by designing some of the world’s most significant buildings and urban interventions. Amongst them are Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Neil Denari, Wes Jones and Eric Owen Moss. Whilst Moss and Jones are native Californians, the others have been attracted to the area by the fecund architectural opportunities, the optimism of some good clients, the pool of talent available to their offices and the often large disposable income of its residents. These architects have done much to expand architectural form-making and digital fabrication as well as theorising its output, and are still going strong as key players in the architectural profession, helping to define the contemporary architectural and academic ambience of California and also globally. They have not only brought audacious buildings to California and the world, but also maintained a presence in architecture schools, particularly SCIArc and UCLA, which many of those featured in this issue have attended and professionally engaged with. Equally, many featured in this volume have passed through their offices. Patrick Tighe is another example of this genealogy, another émigré from out of state but architecturally educated at UCLA from which he gained his Master’s in 1993, rubbing

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shoulders with the aforementioned architects and teachers. Before forming his office in 2001, he worked in the offices of Frank O Gehry & Associates in 1992–3 and then spent seven years at Morphosis, rising to associate, from 1993 to 2000. Tighe’s practice illustrates the wide variety of work that architects can do from the Golden State. In Tighe Architecture’s case this includes high-end one-off exceptionally sited residential villas, affordable housing, mixed-use commercial developments, interior design, installations and exhibition design. The practice describes itself as a post-digital office, where the digital is seamlessly synthesised into every level of its production and management and not fetishised as the be-all and end-all of architectural form-making.

Neil M Denari Architects (NMDA), 5600 West Adams, Los Angeles, California, 2021 Denari and his architectural practice have a long history of formal exuberance, particularly rejoicing in modern materials and arresting tactics for turning a building’s corners, for example in this office development. This age-old interest in the corner and the juxtaposition of one façade into another is as old as architecture itself.

Jones, Partners: Architecture, ISO-standard bar and offices, Los Angeles, California, 2017 left: These structures are ‘temporary’ additions to a creative workplace compound, using 20-foot (6-metre) ISO-standard freight containers, minimally modified. One is a two-level, 10-container complex with decks and privacy louvres. above: Visible through the opening between the two stacks of office containers, the bar hosts monthly semi-raves at the complex. The canopy infill was designed and built by Vertebrae.

Tighe Architecture, Tigertail, Los Angeles, California, 2014 The formal dexterity of mid-century Modernism is transformed into early 21st-century modern by this elegant single-family house with its refined articulation of spaces and its vary degrees of spatial enclosure framing the landscape around it.

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Fabricating Housing Of course, any architectural publication cannot ignore the plight of the tens of thousands of people who live on the streets – the unhoused. Author Frances Anderton describes the factors and politics that continue to influence California, and particularly LA’s problems in this respect. She then takes a look at some of the architects who through their work have sought to mitigate these problems, and at some of the rather fine architecture that has been produced to imbue a sense of dignity. Craig Hodgetts, who so eloquently sets the historical architectural context for us at the top of the issue is also working on this problem, designing factory-built housing with his firm Hodgetts+Fung. Hodgetts has had an interest in industrialised architecture since his thesis project at Yale over 50 years ago, which resulted in articles and patents for a factory-made housing system that sadly was never realised. Hodgetts and his preoccupation with factory prefabrication of building elements came partially together in the temporary Towell Library at UCLA (1992). The client for the firm’s current

Hodgetts+Fung, CASSETTE modular factory-built housing, Los Angeles, California 2022 A further commission from an old client of 30 years ago, returning in a new guise of a housing start-up, has enabled the practice to re-engage with a lifelong preoccupation with modularity and prefabrication, aiming to help ameliorate LA’s housing crisis.

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iteration of prefabricated domestic homes – CASSETTE (now a start-up modular housing company) – was, over 30 years ago, the supplier of the aluminium frame for the Towell, illustrating the longevity of some of the collaborative relationships of the construction industry in the area. As Hodgetts explains, ‘Our work is to produce a sophisticated union between structure and interiors utilising a slew of ahead-of-the-curve materials in order to streamline factory production and steer it away from traditional interior construction and finishing which as you know are the most costly, both in man-hours and production through-put.’1 He is very excited by this commission – it is the culmination of many years of false starts and continuous effort. Likewise, Alexis Rochas and his firm Stereobot have been responsible for some of the most arresting entertainment structures constructed using space-frame nodal technology. Architectural writer Eva Menuhin describes these temporary architectures and the Lazarus-like realisation that such structural protocols could be used in constructing swiftly erected accommodation for the unhoused or the disaster stricken.

Colour and Exuberance Next is a crescendo of colour, with LA-based Atelier Manferdini’s vibrant, folded world which operates at the interstices of art and architecture. The rich textures, aims and objectives of the work are charted by Jasmine Benyamin who analyses its chromatic appeal. Finally, a microcosmic section of the 50-year lifespan of Culver City-based Morphosis Architects is told through five models, one from each decade of their exuberant development. Experiment and exuberance characterise Californian architectural dreams. California is a big place with nearly 40 million inhabitants – a melting pot of cultures, a hotspot of creative energy – and consists of varying terrains on which to situate and experiment with architecture. It is therefore no surprise that some of the world’s most renowned and emerging architects call it home. 1

Note 1. Email conversation between Craig Hodgetts and Neil Spiller, 9 August 2022.

Neil M Denari Architects (NMDA), La Brea Hotel, West Hollywood, California, 2022 The curvaceous and sleek façade of this boutique hotel is modulated and articulated by holes cut into its surface for window openings, thereby compositionally exploiting the contrast between the rectilinear and the sinuous.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 6–7 © Slim Aarons / Stringer/Getty Images; pp 8–9, 11(b) © Tighe Architecture; p 10 Photo Benny Chan, Fotoworks; p 11(tl) © Jones, Partners: Architecture; p 11(tr) © Art Grey Photography; p 12 © Hodgetts+Fung; p 13 © Neil M Denari Architects

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Craig Hodgetts

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Richard Neutra, Josef von Sternberg House, Northridge, California, 1935 The clean, low-profile, pre-formed steel panels and corrugated metal of the house Neutra designed for Joseph von Sternberg on 13 undeveloped acres (5 hectares) in the San Fernando Valley had nothing in common with the pastiche styles favoured by Hollywood celebrities in the 1930s, but rather possessed a sublime modesty and sobriety. The house was demolished in 1972.

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The story of California – the influence of its émigré architects during the 20th century and its important position in developing the ‘cool’ mid-century modernism that was to become so fashionable around the globe – cannot be underestimated. Craig Hodgetts, architect and academic, and founding half of architectural practice Hodgetts+Fung, looks back at those heady days and the evolution of Los Angeles as an architectural mecca.

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Wilshire Boulevard looking west along the envisioned ‘Miracle Mile’ from Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, California, c 1920 This undeveloped dirt road would soon become a densely developed commercial artery crossing Los Angeles from the downtown core to the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica.

Wilshire Boulevard at dusk, looking west from Catalina Street, Los Angeles, California, 1928 opposite: The Ambassador Hotel (1921), Wilshire Brown Derby (1926) and Wilshire Christian Church (1927) had by this time been put in place along this stretch of the boulevard, but billboards only announced promises yet to be kept.

It did not take much – just the trifecta of sun-drenched days, glowing beaches and the siren call of a liberated lifestyle – to prompt émigré architects already wary of growing tensions across pre-Second World War Europe to flock to California, and specifically to Los Angeles. Inspired in part by utopian visions of a modern industrialised nation, and looking forward to an open-ended future, they must have been dismayed to find a landscape littered with bungalows not so different from village architecture in the homeland. There were of course exceptions. But to two Austrians, Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, who arrived in the early 1920s, shared a fraught link to Frank Lloyd Wright and ultimately a communal livework arrangement in Hollywood, LA was a blank slate – a tabula rasa that offered a rich mix of progressive values, daring clients and little in the way of bureaucratic building restrictions. What they did not anticipate was that LA’s cultural elite was still playing catch-up with an old-school European model – memorably manifest in the Art Deco Hollywood Bowl shell (Allied Architects) and Bullock’s Department Store (John and Donald Parkinson) of 1929, but even earlier with American real-estate developer and conservationist Abbot Kinney’s dreamed-up Italianate porticoes for a 1905 resort on the beach in what would become Venice. Crucially, they did not foresee that their disruptive experiments with concrete and steel would pose an existential threat to the traditional American balloon framing system. Not unlike the aesthetic travails Igor Stravinsky, Bertolt Brecht and Billy Wilder endured while working with Hollywood’s entertainment moguls, Schindler and Neutra were destined to encounter the decidedly unsophisticated captains of the local bricks-and-mortar game, and had a devil of a time wedging themselves into a crowded field of local developers and designers. Even so, by 1935, as Hollywood was bustling with actors, directors and producers busy burnishing their personal notoriety, filmmaker Josef von Sternberg’s radical Neutra-designed house became all the rage. Modern architecture had arrived and gurus and patrons like faith-healer Aimee Semple McPherson, naturopathic doctor Philip Lovell and oil baroness Aline Barnsdall fed a posh appetite for experimentation, which Schindler and Neutra lost no time cultivating. The explosion of interest in modernist houses that are still radical, even today – Schindler’s Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach (1926) and Neutra’s Lovell Health House in LA’s Los Feliz neighbourhood (1929) – had introduced the

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two architects into the ranks of the international avantgarde even if they had a negligible effect on the vast middle-age paunch of LA. After the Second World War, taking wartime workers’ housing as a template (ignoring the recent injection of European modernism), developers spread a first fuzz of lookalike housing along the sabotaged Pacific Electric rail network just in time to welcome returning veterans with federal loans beckoning them to buy into the California dream. Bullets to Ploughshares Industrial jobs were plentiful. Once the hub of wartime production, California was evolving into an industrial powerhouse. So for the heirs to postwar California, the spoils were a grab bag full to bursting with novel technology, raw materials and manufacturing know-how. Aluminium, fibreglass, plastics, Formica, stainless steel, chrome and plywood were there for the taking, and quickly began to transform the look of every imaginable commodity. Charles and Ray Eames, who developed a process for forming plywood in the bedroom of their Neutra-designed apartment in Westwood, quickly began raiding surplus inventories, leading in rapid order to the plywood and fibreglass chairs that became synonymous with their name.

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Richard Neutra, Josef von Sternberg House, Northridge, California, 1935 top: The Viennese-born von Sternberg revealed in his memoir that he envisioned a house in a meadow, seen here under construction – a distant retreat for himself, his books and his modern art collection, where he would plant a thousand trees. Richard Neutra, Lovell Health House Los Angeles, California, 1927 bottom: The hillside house Neutra designed for naturopath Dr Philip Lovell in the Los Feliz neighbourhood of LA is considered to be the earliest steel-frame house in the US, and one of the first in which the sprayed-on concrete mixture ‘gunite’ was used. Neutra himself operated as contractor on this project in order to have more control over costs and the quality of construction.

Ralph Rapson, Project drawing for Case Study House No 4 (unbuilt), 1945 Rapson’s unbuilt ‘Greenbelt House’ celebrates postwar suburban domesticity on the ground as much as it projects a modernist vision of seamless indooroutdoor living.

Craig Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, Ralph Rapson, Eero Saarinen, Raphael Soriano and others developed a language that showcased new materials, open plans and an indoor-outdoor ethos for living

With editor John Entenza’s launch of the seminal Case Study House Program in the January 1945 issue of Arts & Architecture magazine, this exuberance crescendoed, propelling a flurry of interest in the distillation of a genuinely original vocabulary from the high spirits of the previous decades. Craig Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, Ralph Rapson, Eero Saarinen, Raphael Soriano and others who participated developed a language that showcased new materials, open plans and an indoor-outdoor ethos for living. ‘Carports’ framed the fins and hues of glamorous cars, literally rendering them part of the interior decor of glassed-in living spaces. The ‘California lifestyle’ brilliantly evoked in serigraphs by Carlos Diniz in tandem with Julius Shulman’s iconic photography of Case Study houses created a stir across the Atlantic, whereupon Norman Foster took off for studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Esther McCoy found her lifelong role as muse and chronicler of the era. Just three years after the Case Study programme was launched, a visionary commission went to Gregory Ain to design ‘100 houses for 100 average veterans’ families’ on a tract in Mar Vista. Ain refused to compromise with marketing pressures midway through, and only 52 of the homes were built, but the development remains a milestone in affordable singlefamily housing.

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Wallflowers But again, these modernist dreams, diffused worldwide via Madison Avenue and Hollywood from the early 1950s, had little impact on a feverish housing boom fuelled by federal subsidies, cheap labour and a construction system requiring little in the way of design, engineering or craft. It was not long before huge swaths of tract homes and blushing dingbat apartments with names like La Traviata and Villa Serrano lined bloated streets throughout greater LA. It was, in its way, a perfect formula for housing nuclear families gathered around a barbecue, or teens attracted as if by magic to drive-ins and commercial strips where they could show off their hot rods. Television, itself on the rise, echoed and reinforced a lifestyle of feckless youth culture, with parents lounging on La-Z-Boys while the laugh tracks of sitcoms echoed in the background. The new generation of designers, beguiled by endless boulevards and a new kind of automobile-centric urban landscape, ushered in an architecture designed for motion. Soon the swooping lines, staccato colours and zigzagging neon of drive-in restaurants with names like Mel’s and Norm’s, motor hotels, gas stations and car washes lined the popular ‘strips’ of LA. Where provenance once ruled, the latest and newest was crowned king, and architects took the bait. For a culture already steeped in engine swaps, fake fur and TV dinners, Sunset Strip drive-ins offered architects like John Lautner and Helen Lui Fong a swashbuckling ride into a field already studded with icons like AC Martin’s glittering 1939 May Company building anchoring the westward thrust of the ‘Miracle Mile’ along Wilshire Boulevard, and ordinary apartment buildings with underslung carports and swish graphics to sort them from the rubber-stamp plans of their neighbours.

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John Lautner, Googie’s Coffee Shop, Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, California, 1949 Here captured in a 35mm colour slide circa 1958, Lautner’s folded, striped design for his coffee shop next to Schwab’s Pharmacy on the southeast corner of Sunset and La Cienega (demolished 1989) established the Googie brand and set the tone for myriad coffee shops, restaurants and drive-ins famed for their bold geometric shapes, vivid palettes and graphics, and brightly lit modern interiors.

César Pelli and Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall (DMJM), Urban Nucleus at Sunset Mountain Park, Santa Monica Mountains, Los Angeles, California, 1966 In contrast to the urban sprawl ubiquitous in Los Angeles, Pelli’s project – commissioned by Sunset International Petroleum Corporation but never built – clings to the contours of its Santa Monica mountain site. The dense, sustainable and liveable ensemble of terraced communal dwellings is deployed with machine-like precision in a mash-up of ancient and futuristic references.

But the architecture of drive-in culture was viewed with suspicion by establishment developers. Apparently unaware of the coming youthquake, they went on supporting the hacks who had found a profitable niche in the construction of satellite shopping centres further and further from the old urban core. White flight eviscerated LA’s downtown, which fast became a ghost town, with gaunt turn-of-the-century buildings long abandoned by the merchant class that built them, newly occupied by flamed-out attorneys and accountants. A creative torpor, dominated by Hollywood’s inept posturing, descended on the city. It seemed a hopeless state of affairs, which by the late 1960s had become something only architectural historian and theorist Reyner Banham could celebrate. The hum of traffic rose in concert with the density of smog and the endlessness of summer, while a tangle of new freeways ambled over the horizon to more endlessness. A revolutionary flash of hope came with César Pelli’s 1966 award-winning Urban Nucleus at Sunset Mountain Park design for a dense community in the Santa Monica Mountains, which challenged the premise of spec residential design and lifestyle. Inspired by European hill towns and yet far ahead of its time and energised by a cascading rhythm, Sunset Mountain promised to achieve urban density in the undisturbed natural landscape, swapping graded lots for closely packed housing nestled into the site, and sustainable goals for developers’ land grabs. But it was not to be. The die had been cast.

As the blanket of low-rise single-family housing punctuated by mid-rise commercial buildings and shopping centres spread across the city, there seemed little appetite for architecture, much less the innovative sort that had been projected from the 1920s. On my first visit to LA, ex-Eames visionary filmmaker John Whitney, a native Angelino, deflated my initial enthusiasm by ensuring me there was nothing much to see. When Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies was first published in 1971,1 painter and critic Peter Plagens published an 11,000-word excoriation in Artforum entitled ‘Los Angeles: The Ecology of Evil’, in which he went so far as to label Banham’s book dangerous: ‘In a more humane society where Banham’s doctrines would be measured against the subdividers’ rape of the land and the lead particles in little kids’ lungs, the author might be stood up against a wall and shot.’2 Beach Boys It is hard to say what attracted a bevy of newly minted architects to Venice Beach, a place caught between eras and still recovering from the demise of hundreds of oil wells that peppered its shoreline from 1929. Disenfranchised by the City of LA almost as soon as it was annexed in 1926, by the 1950s Venice was considered a slum. Notorious for neglected canals choked with rotting plants, menaced by motorcycle gangs and avoided by tourists, there was nothing to recommend it but sunlight and the ocean – even the

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scrappy beaches were mostly deserted. The final blow came when Abbot Kinney’s Ocean Park burned down in 1969. But rents were cheap and abandoned storefronts beckoned anyone prospecting for studio space. Although the Eames studio had been hiding there in plain sight since 1943, established firms wanted no part of it, and the outliers moved in. Thus was born a brew of architects and like-minded artists who, totally unknown to one another, began to stitch together studios along the deserted alleys, until Thom Mayne, in the 1970s, opened his loft to fellow architects to show their work. This was not some romantic rendezvous of visionary individuals hell-bent on establishing themselves in a new firmament, as some have suggested. It was, rather, a feral place at the

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far edge of the city where the reality of rusted fencing, torn corrugations and tangled sheet metal suggested a new way of thinking, a petri dish of creative inspiration that, if you were tuned in, force-fed your imagination, something like what Artforum editor Philip Leider meant by the term ‘Cool School’ artists.3 At the same time, Maurice Tuchman was launching the ‘Experiments in Art and Technology’ exhibition for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and a sputtering gallery scene with names like Ferus and Blum was springing up on La Cienega Boulevard to ignite imaginations. As the impact of visiting East and West Coast critics, artists and curators began to be felt in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seemed like there were no rules, no trappings of a critical crowd, so for artists and

architects alike, if it felt right, you might strip the façade from an existing storefront and fill the frame with a transparent scrim (Robert Irwin), or sell 6 x 3 foot (2 x 1 metre) signed posters from a table in the middle of the street (Robert Rauschenberg), or even invite passers-by to slather model parts with auto filler (Studio Works). As this nascent creative scene sputtered to life, only spasms of attention from the East Coast greeted projects like Pelli’s startling 1966 Sunset Mountain and Studio Works’ 1972 Mobile Theater Prototype. When Frank Gehry decided to abandon his successful commercial practice and left his cushy Santa Monica space for a narrow storefront on the beach, no one really noticed. It was the 1970s, it was Venice – fast becoming home to misfits. It was not until the coincidence in 1978 of the 2-4-6-8 House by Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi of Morphosis,

and Gehry’s own fenced-in readymade house, that the architecture establishment craned its neck to take a closer look at Los Angeles. By that time, the Venice boardwalk had been discovered by lithe women on rollerblades, and bodybuilders had set up a showcase on the beach in front of Gold’s Gym. The circus had come to town, and with it an easy camaraderie among architects, artists, musicians, filmmakers and writers in their rough-hewn live-work studios. The same year, 1978, Bruce Marder’s West Beach Café became the creative mixing chamber that had been lacking. A new culture was on the rise that would have far-reaching effects on architecture, art and the urban environment. In 1983 Marder commissioned Gehry to design Rebecca’s across the street. In 1984, denizens at 72 Market Street tipped their stovepipe hats to sometimes rowdy guys who were inventing the next thing. When the overarching dream of a contemporary art museum in downtown LA first materialised in an abandoned police garage in 1989, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) director-to-be Richard Koshalek – working from his Neutra-designed apartment – hatched an ambitious exhibition showcasing the Case Study House Program.4 Full-scale replicas of Case Study House No 4 by Rapson, and No 22, Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House, were constructed by Hodgetts+Fung with ‘lived-in look’ interiors deftly accessorised by film production designers David Wasco and Sandy Reynolds-Wasco. The idea was for visitors to imagine themselves living there. Though the Koenig house might have been familiar to the general public, the unbuilt Rapson was a surprise to everyone. When asked to approve a mandated visitor’s path through the courtyard, Rapson remarked that it was fine by him, so long as it looked like an airport landing strip. Could now be a good time to rethink Pelli’s Sunset Mountain scheme? 1 Notes 1. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, University of California Press (Los Angeles), 1971. 2. Peter Plagens, ‘Los Angeles: The Ecology of Evil’, Artforum, December 1972, pp 67–76. 3. Philip Leider, ‘The Cool School’, Artforum, 2 (12), summer 1964, p 3. 4. See Elizabeth AT Smith and Esther McCoy, Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses, exh cat, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1989, p 67. See also California Design 1930–1965: ‘Living in a Modern Way’, exh cat, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 2011.

Frederick Fisher, Robert Mangurian, Eric Owen Moss, Coy Howard, Craig Hodgetts, Thom Mayne and Frank Gehry, Venice Beach, Los Angeles, California, 1980 A number of the architects who had been living and working in Venice were photographed together on the beach in 1980. The photograph is a snapshot of the denizens of experimental architectural culture that thrived in LA in the 1970s and 1980s.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 14 –15, 18 Luckhaus Studio, Richard and Dion Neutra papers, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA; pp 16 –17 Collection Tom Zimmerman; p 19 © Ralph Rapson, Rapson Architects; p 20 Courtesy Richard Wojcik; p 21 Courtesy Pelli Clarke & Partners: pp 22–3 Ave Pildas © 1980

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Max Kuo

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Synthesis Design + Architecture, Durotaxis Chair, 2014 The Durotaxis Chair is specifically designed for the capabilities of a specialised 3D printer that is able to deposit gradient distributions of colour, density and pliability.

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There are three ways to be Californian, suggests UCLA lecturer Max Kuo. In determining that Alvin Huang, principal of Synthesis Design + Architecture, is a third-way Californian, he charts his emergence as an architect via his postgraduate studies at the Architectural Association in London and working at the esteemed offices of Zaha Hadid and Amanda Levete, before moving to California to start his own practice and finding China particularly hospitable to his architecture.

Alvin Huang and Alan Dempsey, [C]Space Pavilion, Architectural Association Design Research Lab (AADRL), London, 2008 Huang and Dempsey designed and fabricated [C]Space Pavilion while studying at the AA. Assembled from 850 custom-cut cement boards, this display of intricate complexity would launch Huang’s career of professional practice and academic research.

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There are three ways to be Californian. If you already live here, then you were most likely born elsewhere. In her book Piecing Together Los Angeles (2012), writer and curator Susan Morgan points out that Esther McCoy, historian of California modern architecture, and her accolades were all transplants from elsewhere.1 The second way to be Californian, as The Mammas & the Papas once sang, is to not be here at all. As their lyrics go, you’re off in a dreary place longing for the California imaginary. And finally, the third way is to be a native living in California. This is the most marginal way to be. With no cosmopolitan narrator validating your experiences, you are left alone to forge your own path. And if you happen to be this third-way Californian, then you probably recognise the biography of Alvin Huang, principal of Synthesis Design + Architecture (SDA), who confounds the typical dialectic of the provincial and cosmopolitan that always seems to ignite the mythology of the West. As a young architect, Huang was clearly not dreaming of California. Receiving his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, he inherited the modernist legacy of experimentation McCoy had championed a generation ago. That experimentation had become dogma at USC, and though studio culture was rigorous, it was not concerned with innovation. In the late 1990s, Huang was one of very few students working with Form-Z, privileging digital modelling as an essential design tool. The young architect was riding high, graduating with several professional prospects in his hometown. Hired by design and engineering firm AECOM at a time when digital computation was just beginning to enter architectural workflows, the graduate oversaw the Los Angeles office’s digital modelling and rendering, and realised that by controlling the digital model, one became keeper of the kingdom. Though he quickly earned recognition from the partners, Huang would look beyond California as he applied to graduate schools abroad. Chuckling over his own naivete at the time, he recounts the day a coworker saw his graduate-school applications and insisted that he apply to the Architectural Association (AA) in London. Admitting he had never heard of the institution, his coworker teasingly asked if he had ever heard of Rem Koolhaas, or perhaps Zaha Hadid. Entering the AA Design Research Lab (AADRL) class of 2004, Huang encountered an intense studio culture with sleepless nights and endless debates referring to esoteric architects and exotic ideas he had never heard of. During these formative years, the Californian became acquainted with the cosmopolitanism of London and its cultural curiosity and engagement with the world. During the economic and globalising optimism of the early noughties, architecture was framed as an instrument of convergence, releasing the energetic flows of urban and cultural complexity. Specifically, the discourse at the AADRL was entrenched in the performative capacities of complex formmaking, namely the project of parametricism, where architecture was understood to be interactive expressions of a building’s programme and surrounding ecology. Huang’s splashy design-build project [C]Space Pavilion (2008), designed with former student cohort Alan Dempsey, was the capstone to his graduate studies. Installed in London’s Bedford Square, home of the AADRL, the bandshell-like ovoid pavilion was articulated by 850 custom-cut fibre-cement planks designed

with more than 2,000 uniquely intersecting joints, shimmering with gradients of porosity and shadow. Even as the architect delivers an elegant summation of the structure’s virtuosity, he undercuts this with self-deprecating humour, always happy to reveal the back-of-house calamities, whether this be the ‘do not climb’ signage or the camouflaged steel reinforcements corrupting any claims of material purity. Despite this lack of pretense, Huang’s profile was rising through his creative achievements. [C] Space Pavilion was the founding project that would introduce him as an innovator within the European architecture circuit, and was the beginning of a career-long pursuit of digital craft, parametric research and media savvy. The Polycentric Vanguard Upon graduation, Huang went to work in the offices of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), Future Systems and eventually Amanda Levete Architects (AL_A), which provided formative experiences collaborating on international projects. He was immersed in the architectural vanguard of the polycentric parametricism movement where the genus of innovation was no longer tied to any one place or mythology. Through Zaha, Huang contributed to projects in Spain, France, Dubai and Beijing. Later, with AL_A, he would continue to expand his experience in Asia working on Central Embassy, a retail and hospitality tower in Bangkok completed in 2017. By then a director in Levete’s office, Huang

began to question where life and career would lead him next. Having found rapport and repeat business through his Bangkok clients, he began considering starting his own independent practice, which he did in 2011 with the founding of SDA. Around this same time, a fortuitous recruiting call from Neil Leach would ultimately result in his alma mater USC hiring him back to Los Angeles where he is now Director of Graduate and PostProfessional Architecture Programs. Returning to his native Los Angeles, Huang set to work articulating his practice within the context of a city and university that had become new to him. Commuting between life and work through the enclaves of Alhambra, Downtown and South Central, he embodies an all-too-common Californian life that is rarely mythologised – creative life coursing through an unglamorous ‘drosscape’ without fanfare. His creative research focuses on the complex feedback loops between digital design and fabrication as opportunities to maximise their translational effects, a process he refers to as ‘digital techne’. The novel discoveries of his research are best exemplified in several early SDA projects. The Durotaxis Chair (2014) embodies the critical interrogation into how one designs a 3D-printed form rather than merely how one 3D prints a design. The significant shift in emphasis requires a methodological re-evaluation where the designer must understand the capacities and biases of digital tools as the integral path towards generating form.

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In collaboration with Stratysis’s premier printer, the Objet 500 Connex, the chair’s design maximises the machine’s ability to produce a meshwork that distributes size, scale, density and colour with variations that are more akin to the organic transition from soft tissue to rigid bone. Successfully executed, Huang humorously admits the absurd cost of prototyping such an extravagant piece of furniture. Learning from the experience, SDA subsequently designed the La Burbuja lamp (2016) by reconciling the geometry of more than 12,000 packed soap bubbles to a decahedron, reducing the manufacturing costs down to US$80 compared to the astronomical US$18,000 of the Durotaxis Chair. This integrated approach guides the research of SDA, equally interested in theories of form and pragmatics of practice. In his annual orientation lecture at USC, Huang defines architecture as three overlapping arenas of concern: the commons, the profession and the discipline. This holistic approach governs SDA projects, as demonstrated by The Groove at CentralWorld (2015), a retail and entertainment complex in the heart of Bangkok. Fortuitously, Huang’s former contacts at Central Group reached out shortly after SDA was established. The young scions of Central Group were taking over the family business and shared Huang’s critical interests in reinventing and rebranding legacy institutions and methods. SDA’s proposal is a seductive and multivalent approach to the many scalar implications of the project. This urban choreography begins with a connection from the Bangkok Skytrain gathering into a perforated metallic façade that shines alongside the deep shadows of the hulking concourse, then multiplies into recessed wood soffits that swoop into and wrap around an inner-pocketed atrium. The curved surfaces cloak the visiting public, foregrounding the representation of experience that Huang privileges as a core function of architecture. Commanding a popular Instagram account with more than 22,000 followers, Huang considers social media’s construction of new audiences and civic forum in a post-digital age which accelerates the influence of architectural media. The ability of iconic architecture to attract ever-more diverse and younger crowds is a function of the memorability of user experience. Influenced by the sociologist Don Enright’s theory of ‘memorable experiences’ based on the principles of ‘agenda fulfillment, novelty, affect, and rehearsal’,2 SDA strives to provide experiences that exceed user expectations and become eminently more memorable. Huang’s long-time command of digital media and technology results in an appetite for tectonic wizardry that is calibrated for a world where image and spatial depth interpolate one another. The high-resolution surface patterns and exaggerated topologies produce chiaroscuro snapshots that are instantly sharable and likable. These visual effects produce a commons that is equally distinctive both online and offline. Diasporic Futures Settled in his personal and professional life in LA, Huang continues to expand his practice and projects internationally. Asia has become a receptive market for SDA’s vanguard form-making. Huang often shirks off the international profile of his work, claiming that past commissions have only come through personal connections as if to suggest that his California is a regional one, where one’s ambitions are bound by identity, clan relations and geographic radii.3 But the reality is that attaining our dreams

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Synthesis Design + Architecture, La Burbuja lamp, 2016 The diagram describes the lamp’s geometric and tectonic organisation, which reconciles more than 12,000 soap bubbles to an internal decahedron. This parametric rationalisation allows the lamp’s constructability to become much more efficient while maximising the object’s radiant effects.

is nuanced and richly woven through chance encounters, hardearned accolades as well as social networks, all of which Huang works hard at. One such dream, currently under construction and due for completion in 2025, began with contacts of his father. The Hakka Performance Center & Terrace Hotel is located in Yongding, China, a city within Huang’s ancestral Fujian Province. What might have been a simple tale of a familial and diasporic endeavour is slated to be a world-class project, an architectural allegory of an ancestral heritage transformed into an icon that is simultaneously familiar yet wholly novel. Deferring to the cultural appetites of East Asian clients, Huang often uses the seduction of the architectural metaphor. He presents the Hakka Performance Center as an abstraction of the tulou typology, a doughnut-shaped traditional communal housing type local to the area. But with a digital sleight-ofhand, the architectural massing resonates just enough with its typological ancestor to undermine it. The inward-facing doughnut transforms into a wrapper, the continuously changing section of which coils around and then flips outward into an extroverted hotel. Architecture is interpretive, and Huang’s metaphor is both an offering and subversion of the familiar. The building begins as mass, then spirals as surface, and finally anchors back into ground. The design deftly choreographs layers of expectation, subversion and wonderment.

Synthesis Design + Architecture, The Groove at CentralWorld, Bangkok, Thailand, 2015 Undulating in plan and elevation, the façade animates the project’s urban presence which is compressed within a very dense city centre. The façade design is a smooth graphic which coincides with the massing of the building, yet also peels back its various layers to accommodate human and commercial interaction at individual storefronts and terraces.

Synthesis Design + Architecture, Hakka Performance Center & Terrace Hotel, Yongding, Fujian Province, China, due for completion 2025 above: The rendering reveals a stunning new contribution to the foothills of Yongding city. While the design references the tulou typology, it also inventively hybridises the performance centre with the mat condition of the terrace hotel. In doing so, the large massing integrates into the landscape through a series of terraced architectural strata. left: Currently under construction, the structural skeleton reveals the underlying geometric armature that subverts the traditional tulou typology. What might have been the tulou’s roof eave kicks out and begins to boomerang out and construct a series of wrapping surfaces.

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Synthesis Design + Architecture, Uxmal Art Gallery and Event Space, Arts District Center, Los Angeles, California, due for completion 2024 right: The figure of the gallery and event space will be cloaked in metallic panelling stamped with Mayan, Greek, Chinese and Adrinkan hieroglyphics. This material language will give the effect of liquid metal spaces flowing through the building as if caught between two different worlds. below: The gallery interior will introduce a third tectonic and material enviornment. Terraced seating and stairs along with overhead bubble vaults will provide a public commons for art exhibitions and cultural events.

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Located on the third storey, the gallery and event spaces will be inserted into the cultural loggia of the Arts District Center. The freeform shell of the gallery puckers with a series of apertures that both protrude beyond the structural columns and suck inward towards the gallery.

If architecture can offer allegories of the architect’s personal journey, it is no wonder that expectation and defamiliarisation feel so natural in Huang’s work. It is an outgrowth of a lifetime of social acrobatics one performs as an Asian-American teacher, practitioner and community member, keeping his sights on immigrant communities, colleagues, competitors, students and international audiences. When one performs so many guises, reinvention becomes a strategy of inclusion, playing off the expectations of different audiences and collaborators. Cultivating this multidimensional identity also gives greater meaning to those opportunities when the three overlapping arenas of architecture mesh in mutually supporting ways. SDA’s recent design, the Uxmal Art Gallery and Event Space, demonstrates this synergy between the discipline, the commons and the profession. The proposal, scheduled for completion in 2024, is conceived as a distinct object floating within a larger building, the Arts District Center designed by AC Martin and currently under development by Kevin Chen, located in Downtown Los Angeles. Embedded within a matrix of over 24,000 square feet (2,340 square metres) of hospitality, residential and commercial spaces, SDA’s metallic globule of an art gallery is a spectacular paradox: an out-of-this-world form embodying a new cultural commons that fosters local art making. Sponsored by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Uxmal Art Gallery and other facilities within the Art District Center will host a youth empowerment programme in collaboration with an artist and curator residency programme. The liquid metal shell floats, bulges and swells, indifferent to the columnar order while puckering out as viewing platforms, tucking in as reception entrances, and swallowing the service core. Typical for SDA, the interior is formed by morphologies that appear simultaneously natural and

artificial. Intersecting ovoids produce bubble vaults that coincide with local programming zones and deviate into frothy field effects. This flagship project will be the Angeleno’s most ambitious and gratifying hometown project to date, an architecture that is both formally and culturally ambitious, marshalling the institutional and cultural capital of the city to benefit those at both the centre and margins of power. Alvin Huang proves that this third way of being Californian is a gratifying one, and yet is so often untold because it is neither tidy nor generalisable. The usual Californian mythology provincialises Los Angeles within the world of architecture as a bastion of self-isolating and cheery innovation. But Huang’s story reveals the complex networks of migration, ideas and identity that cohere around the pursuit of architectural culture and community. The local is fiercely preserved even as this regional ethic remains open to the world. California will always be a place to escape from, to find refuge in, and to proclaim great architectural ideas to a network of friends and allies around the world. However iconoclastic, the most compelling mythologies are often the ones lived and told by these third-way Californians. 1 Notes 1. Susan Morgan, Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader, East of Borneo Books (Valencia, CA), 2012, p 63. 2. Don Enright, ‘What Makes an Experience Memorable?’, 23 May 2016: www.donenright.com/makes-experience-memorable/. 3.Alvin Huang, ‘Public Lecture X Alvin Huang – Live Academy (Video)’, YouTube, 15 June 2020: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lSJFyZEQUYE&t=1228s.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 24–5, 28, 29(c&b), 30–31© Synthesis Design + Architecture; p 27 © Architectural Asociation Archives; p 29(t) © Shapeshift Studio

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THE ARCHITECTURE OF FAÇADES AND ENVELOPES

Faulders Studio, Wynwood Garage Façade, Miami, Florida, 2018 From a distance, one can appreciate that the design of this eight-storey façade pays homage to the local mural scene, creating another visually arresting presence in the area.

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Blaine Brownell

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Orchestrating façades and fenestration has become a much elevated art in contemporary California. Highly articulating the way a building faces onto the street is an expertise of Oakland-based architect Thom Faulders. Blaine Brownell, architect, educator and researcher in emergent materials, examines Faulders Studio’s recent oeuvre and its audacious and attractive material expression. One of the most appreciated and yet least interrogated aspects of design is the nature of the impression it makes on observers. In his landmark 1960 publication The Image of the City, urban planner Kevin Lynch introduced the term ‘imageability’ to describe how readily a designed object or environment would impart a lasting memory in the mind of a viewer.1 According to Lynch, imageability is ‘that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment.’2 Although Lynch’s focus was on the urban-scale paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks that facilitate our comprehension of cities, the concept of imageability is just as applicable at the smaller scale of architectural features. Given imageability’s emphasis on physicality, materiality plays a fundamental role at this scale. The material characteristics of building components, and the story they convey about the processes of fabrication and installation, are essential aspects of what makes architecture imageable. Architect Thom Faulders is adept in harnessing innovative fabrication processes to create memorable architectural experiences. In his visually striking designs of façades, canopies and other publicfacing building elements, he exemplifies an approach we might call ‘material imageability’. California Zeitgeist Faulders leads Faulders Studio, an interdisciplinary office that investigates non-standard material practices in the design of unconventional architectural strategies. His notable early projects include the Mute Room installation at the CCA Watts Institute, San Francisco, in 2000, an undulating floor clad with memory foam that retained the impression of visitor footprints, and AirSpace Tokyo (2006), a multilayered façade design composed of porous metal skeins. Faulders Studio operates within a California zeitgeist

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steeped in explorations of imagery and materiality. Although the San Francisco architecture and design scene is distinct from its Los Angeles counterpart, it shares a penchant for visual storytelling resulting from the pervasive influence of the film and television industry. California’s postwar culture of material experimentation, which today continues to be shaped by advances in prominent local tech companies, extends to the distinctive approaches of contemporary San Francisco architects such as Rael San Fratello, Ogrydziak Prillinger and IwamotoScott. Faulders, who largely limits the scope of his design interrogation to specific architectural components, is able to achieve remarkable results from the in-depth focus on material capacities and their potentials for imageability. Since AirSpace, Faulders has had a successful run of façade-based commissions. Once the curtain wall became a standard cladding technology in architecture, critics have bemoaned the façade’s relegation to a purely aesthetic pursuit and advocated a more meaningful relationship between it and the rest of the building. And yet, Faulders is content designing building envelopes as standalone, imagedriven projects. The Wynwood Garage Façade in Miami (2018) is a prominent example. Located in a former garment district that is now a mecca for street art, the eight-storey parking garage offered an opportunity to reference the local mural scene in its façade design. Faulders’ solution, which from a distance represents the kind of bold visual statement one associates with mural art, is in fact something very different up close. He relishes paradox in design, harnessing multiple concepts or approaches that, despite their inherent contradictions, are somehow compatible. Oversized Canvas Faulders treated the 46,166 square foot (4,289 square metres) façade of the Wynwood Garage as an oversized canvas, broadcasting a series of intersecting, meandering lines in a high-contrast pattern vaguely reminiscent of veins or tightly packed cellular structures. One might presume

Faulders Studio, Wynwood Garage Façade, Miami, Florida, 2018 Strategically choreographed perforations provide passage of fresh air, daylight, and protected views from within. From the inside the play of air, sunlight and shadow changes throughout the day.

The adroit balancing of multiple contradictions would not be possible without a thorough understanding of material capacities and an appreciation for visitors’ perceptual expectations

that such a design, as a radical departure from recognisable building logics (floor lines, structural lines, control joints), is mere application. In fact, what we see is the result of material manipulation and functional provision. Materially, the black-and-white colours of the pattern are actually void and solid slotted perforations in sheets of aluminium plate that converge at a distance to form continuous lines. The grey tones exhibited by some of the pattern cells are actually fields of regularly spaced circular perforations. These slots and holes fulfil the necessary function of delivering fresh air and daylight to the interior volumes, while the remaining material acts as a sun shade. In this way, the entire envelope is akin to an outsized mashrabiya – an intricately patterned window that provides ventilation, shade and protected views. This window’s surface is not flat but dimensional: the subtle visual vibrations detected when one changes position in relation to the building are created by continuous lines of protruding aluminium fins. These thin metal blades reinforce the design visually while providing additional structural rigidity to the skin. Herein lies another paradox: this massive project is sheathed in cladding that is as materially thin as possible, at a mere 1/8 inch in thickness. The adroit balancing of multiple contradictions – an expansive field covered by an ephemeral wrapper, a robust envelope strategy in which tectonic details are intentionally minimised, a mural that transforms into a two-sided, multifunctional canvas – would not be possible without a thorough understanding of material capacities and an appreciation for visitors’ perceptual expectations.

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Faulders Studio, Shapeshift Oakland, Oakland, California, 2021 above: The installation’s composition of thin, visually continuous and spatially separated aluminium plates that are offset from the building subverts expectations of standard construction logic. The subversion of material and surface are specialisations of Faulders Studio. left: This outsized urban ‘fingerprint’ appears as a visually striking wall treatment from a distance – landmark and wayfinding icon helping pedestrian and drivers navigate this part of the city and creating a sense of place.

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Shapeshifting Similar thinking was applied to Shapeshift Oakland (2021), a façade infill project commissioned by the Marriott Moxy Hotel. Shapeshift Oakland is similar to Wynwood Garage in its use of aluminium plate as a primary medium and its intentional subversion of common typologies, such as a mural or a building façade. In this project, Faulders proposed an alternative conceptual shape of Oakland as a seamless experiential and pictorial path, as opposed to a Cartesian map of individual pathways. The resulting abstract pattern is a kind of urban fingerprint, which may also be perceived as a tightly packed maze. Like Wynwood, the Shapeshift Oakland façade imparts visual contrast via material presence and absence. In this case, ¼-inch (0.6-millimetre) thick aluminium plate is supported 9 inches (23 centimetres) away from the black-painted exterior wall surface. Once again, a seemingly simple idea required skilled technical knowledge and effort. The construction of a series of seamlessly flowing yet separated lines (with no material bridges in between lines for additional support) necessitated an intentional undermining of tectonic expression, with imperceptible hairline joints between individual panels. This unbroken material fluidity, spanning vertically across multiple floors without visual interruption, adds substantially to the project’s imageability. Google Residence In the Earth’s Pull shade canopy in the city of Mountain View, California (2021), continuous lines assume the form of ropes draped across a void. The result of Faulders’ artist residency at Google Advanced Technology and Projects, it explores the material and visual characteristics of the catenary curve. Famously tested by Antoni Gaudí, the catenary is the shape that a freely suspended, materially uniform cable takes when gravity is the only acting force. As indicated by its title, Earth’s Pull references two scales: that of its courtyard site and of the globe. In the latter case, the shape of the curve symbolises a cross-section of planetary mass. In addition to this double reading of the visual shape, there is also a material duality. The 250 individual strands of 1.5-inch (3.8-centimetre) diameter rope are sufficiently robust to carry a 10-million-pound weight collectively. However, draped in space without lateral support, the ropes sway with the slightest breeze. This simultaneous gravity and lightness, which are visually reinforced by the dynamic, striated silhouette cast upon the courtyard walls and floor, leave an indelible impression in the mind of the observer. Sky Light in San Jose (2020) extends the catenary curve to the scale of the landscape. A competition entry with Stockholm-based collaborator White Arkitekter, it proposes a massive solar-harnessing shade structure for a city park. The roof is designed to cover 14 acres (5.6 hectares) of fields straddling a river near the existing SAP Arena, providing some 1,545,000 kWh annually via strip photovoltaics comprising the top surface of the lattice. The roof structure is to be made of carbon-sequestering timber beams connected via concealed steel cables.

Faulders Studio, Earth’s Pull, Mountain View, California, 2021

Faulders Studio + White Arkitekter, Sky Light, San Jose, California, 2020

top: In this project, 250 individual ropes form a catenary vault above an outdoor courtyard to create a simple but calm outside space predicated on the reversed arches that the ropes settle into due to their own weight.

bottom: This expansive solar-harvesting roofscape marries the notion of material imageability with Kevin Lynch’s original concept of urban imageability, showing that the same joy and expertise of the Faulders Studio also works at the large scale.

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Faulders Studio, Mount Sinai Medical Center Façade, Miami Beach, Florida, 2023 The six-storey garage façade combines graduated perforations and undulating fin patterns to achieve visual complexity. It is a younger sibling of the Wynwood Garage Façade, but more complex and more gymnastic in its movement and dynamics.

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Together, these form a stressed ribbon catenary surface (based on the structural model of a stressed ribbon bridge, in which structural cables embedded in a deck material form a catenary curve). The roof is to be supported on two ‘forests’ of timber columns that occupy buildable hillsides on each side of the river. With its significant scale, Sky Light represents a departure from Faulders’ typical work on buildings and components. If built, the project would serve as an example of Lynch’s urban imageability. Another on-the-boards project that embraces the line motif is the Mount Sinai Medical Center Façade, Miami (2023). Like Wynwood, this project involves cladding a parking garage – in this case, a six-storey structure with approximately 27,000 square feet (2,500 square metres)

of envelope. The Mount Sinai façade similarly employs thin aluminium panels that are perforated to permit transmission of light and air while imparting a distinctive visual pattern. Aluminium fins also add dimensionality and rigidity to the skin. Mount Sinai incorporates an additional ingredient from the roof-based projects: the catenary. Faulders has designed the fins to follow a curving pattern resembling a draping motion across the façade. The combination of the extended protrusions and the bands of graduated perforations creates a striking visual complexity, appearing to consist of more layers and components than is the reality. The sweeping geometries are appropriate for the garage’s site at the edge of a fastpaced expressway.

On the Spectrum The science of human perception provides clues about why Faulders’ work is imageable. His designs employ several parallel strategies to grab and hold observers’ attention. These approaches comprise a spectrum that ranges from basic to sophisticated. At a fundamental sensory level, the use of high-contrast features attracts attention, and such features have been shown in scientific studies to elevate viewer detection and fixation.3 Faulders also seeks to create novelty, increasing observer attention by subverting conventional design typologies. One of the brain’s natural tendencies is to habituate daily experience to reduce cognitive load. Given the significant amount of time that people spend in the built environment, this tendency has resulted in our unwitting internalisation of many standard construction and spatial practices. By subverting these practices, such as constructing novel patterns or dramatically shifting scale, Faulders is able to break through our autopilot response and recapture our attention. Furthermore, because the architect’s primary work involves the sophisticated manipulation of physical materials – as opposed to applied patterns – to achieve this goal, his designs are more likely to invite visual fixation and the production of memory. Viewers confront building logics that are refreshingly unexpected, defying known conventions of material characteristics such as size, heft, connection, spacing and compartmentalisation. Thus, a critical aspect of material imageability is that it motivates the viewer to shift from the role of a passive observer to that of an active interrogator of the built environment. The architect Kengo Kuma describes this design strategy as seeking to evoke the unreal: ‘If [a design] is a little unreal, there is a little bit of a surprise,’ he says. ‘If there is no surprise with something, it is not real, because it goes unnoticed. It might as well not exist.’4 1 Notes 1. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1960. 2. Ibid, p 9. 3. Bernard Hart et al, ‘Attention in Natural Scenes: Contrast Affects Rapid Visual Processing and Fixations Alike’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 19 October 2013. 4. Kengo Kuma quoted in Blaine Brownell, Matter in the Floating World, Princeton Architectural Press (New York), 2011, p 42.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 32–3 © Photo Moris Moreno Photography; pp 35, 36(r), 37(t), 38–9 © Faulders Studio; p 36(l) Photo Matthew Millman Photography; p 37(b) ©TMRW, courtesy of White Arkitekter / Faulders Studio

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David Freeland and Brennan Buck

PRINTING THE PICTURE PLANE 40

IMAGING SCALES UP

FreelandBuck, One Liner B, ‘One Liner’ series, Los Angeles, California, 2019 The ‘One Liner’ series of image-objects were developed from photographs by Eric Staudenmeier of FreelandBuck's Second House in LA, completed in 2018. Frontally, the object reproduces the photograph of the house, but from other angles, alternate versions of its interior emerge.

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The last few years have witnessed an explosion in printing technologies that facilitate the dressing of buildings in a thin veneer of advertising, visual trickery and anamorphic distortions. David Freeland and Brennan Buck are interested in the articulation of these techniques and scales, and what they might mean for contemporary architecture and our visual experience.

FreelandBuck, ‘Views from the Field’ exhibition, SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles, California, September 2021 The exhibition reconstructed architectural photographs of spaces designed by Walter Netsch and his studio at SOM in Chicago in the 1970s. Three photographs by Orlando Cabanban were each projected onto and through a faceted object, producing recomposed alternative images of Netsch’s spaces and suggesting the plastic and multiplicitous nature of contemporary perspective.

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For several generations, Los Angeles has attracted architects interested in working with the resources and expertise provided by the film and advertising industries. For earlier generations, these resources included digital fabrication facilities, computer graphics expertise, and robotics. FreelandBuck’s current work exploits a more mundane aspect of contemporary Los Angeles: the ubiquity of architecturally scaled graphics, printed veneers, and trompe l’oeil illusion in the urban environment and the film sets scattered throughout the city. These changes in the urban visual environment are enabled by new thin substrate, adhesive and ink technologies, and produced with largeformat flatbed printers. Collectively, they suggest that the representational capacity of buildings can expand in power and precision beyond the Albertian idea that a façade should evoke the spaces behind it. For several years, the practice’s work has been informed by the history of architectural illusion. The Jesuit integration of pictorial space and architectural form was perfected by Andrea Pozzo in the 17th century and deployed in his paintings on vaulted

ceilings from Vienna to Rome. Ever since, Pozzo’s work has been largely dismissed by historians and critics as more of a gimmick than an art form.1 The perspectival projection and the illusion it creates collapse once the viewer moves away from the intended viewpoint, typically stationed at the centre of a given room. But that collapse, and the visual and spatial transformations that a moving viewer experiences as they look at the painting seem newly provocative in an era of increasingly immersive, ‘hot’ media.2 The integration of pictorial and physical space is also emblematic of contemporary visuality. Daily experience is made up of constant fluctuations between the virtual space of digital imagery, seen on an array of screens, and the physical space of buildings, landscapes and cities. These multiple architectural and pictorial perspectives alternate and merge together to form contemporary visuality. Perspective was the subject of critique and analysis throughout the 20th century in the context of analogue media, but its status has rarely been revisited in the context of contemporary image culture. The convention of linear perspective is typically seen as either unchanged by, or irrelevant to, the shift to digital media. The form of images is secondary to their digitised materiality and collective effects. The American architect and theorist John May has led this reassessment of images as a technical format distinct from photographs and drawings.3 He points out that images are flat expressions of a specific sequence of data, fundamentally disconnected from perspectival projection and the photographic parallel – paths of photons converging on the camera lens. Unlike photographs, images bear no (chemical) trace of the physical world, and unlike drawings, geometry plays no role in their production. So where does this leave linear perspective, a format reliant on verisimilitude for its value and geometry for its construction? While the components of a digital camera may seem analogous to the

lens, aperture and negative in an analogue camera, contemporary digital cameras have become more software than hardware, incorporating a series of invisible layers that automatically composite, warp and post-process each image before it is displayed on screen a split second later. Content-aware warping, 3D image compositing and other processes produce images that predict the world’s appearance rather than record it.4 These predictions are based on collections of existing images, many of which index representational conventions, including perspective. Given the ubiquity of images and their impact on what architects and the general public see, create and think, this cleavage from the physical world and the traditional geometric techniques used to describe it gives perspective renewed relevance as a topic of artistic and architectural investigation. Mobile Mutables The subtleties of how space is represented hold surprising power. Many scholars see images as artefacts of culture – a way to trace the state of society at the time of their creation. But others reverse this causal relationship. As part of his work on the social processes behind scientific discovery in the 1980s, the philosopher Bruno Latour identified how apparently insignificant artefacts – instruments, samples and documents – could have a vast impact if networked with other artefacts and individuals. Drawing this idea out, he argued that modern scientific culture is attributable to changes in the technical basis of visual culture. Rejecting more elaborate explanations of the emergence of scientific culture,

including changes in human mentality or the emergence of capitalism, he argued that ‘the Great Divide can be broken down into many small, unexpected and practical sets of skills to produce images, and to read and write about them’.5 Images are a form of ‘inscription’ that allows a physical sample or culture gathered on site or grown in the lab to be translated into another form, one that can be analysed, compared, interpreted and exchanged as a number, diagram, map, photograph or text. What Latour described is a cascade of reduction and simplification through which the complexities of the ‘confusing world’ are transformed into a clear 2D mediation, the meaning of which can be distilled and agreed upon. The inscription stands in place of more direct evidence; its efficacy is reliant on a shared belief that it accurately represents the world. Latour’s argument identifies two key properties of these proliferating inscriptions. The first is mobility; there is only one copy of a physical sample, but its image or data can be easily multiplied and circulated. The second property is consistency; inscriptions are immutable in the sense that multiple copies are effectively identical, allowing for the comparison, evaluation and argumentation needed to produce consensus and accepted facts. Latour’s first example of this type of ‘mobile immutable’ is linear perspective; projective geometry allows a volume and the objects it contains to be consistently understood from multiple points of view.6 Returning to digital images, they are the ultimate mobile format of inscription, proliferating endlessly online. Without a basis in geometry though, they are far from

Multiple architectural and pictorial perspectives alternate and merge together to form contemporary visuality 43

immutable. Automated manipulation is fundamental to their production, and the simulation of perspectival projection they employ produces a new type of pictorial space. Latour’s argument foregrounds the broader epistemological implications of the dominance of images, and their mutability suggests why global culture often seems to be near the end of the modern scientific period, with no set of shared facts on which to base its arguments. For architecture, the mutability of machine-made images destabilises a parallel set of assumptions about the relationship between representation and the world. As a discipline, architecture relies on the ability of others to predictably translate images into buildings, but architects also have a long history of exploiting the ambiguities of 2D representation in the development of 3D architectural space.7 AI-mediated images produced by contemporary smartphone cameras and computer lenses create a new form of ambiguity, producing pictorial space that is neither geometric nor consistent. The perspectival space in the resulting images is subtly malleable, seamlessly collaged, algorithmically adjusted, multiplicitous and plastic. Views from the Field FreelandBuck’s interest in this simulated perspectival space and its collapse with physical space has guided much of its recent work. Over the last several years, the practice has generated a series of new objects from photographs of buildings completed by the office. Each of these small objects is designed in response to the contours of a specific photograph. The photograph is projected on and through the object, creating a three-dimensional image. Frontally, the object represents the original photograph, but as it rotates, the space of the photograph is stretched, reflected and repeated. Viewing it from other orientations produces other versions of that space, and rotating the object produces seamless transitions from one version to the next. The ‘Views from the Field’ exhibition at the SCI-Arc Gallery in

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FreelandBuck, ‘Views from the Field’ exhibition, SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles, California, September 2021 Alternate variations of the intricate cellular spaces Netsch designed were presented on each side of the objects. The pictorial spaces of the original photographs merge visually with the folds and faces of the physical objects and the context of the gallery, reflected in gaps in the print.

September 2021 was an extension of this series of objects. Rather than FreelandBuck’s own work, it documented the spatial complexity of the late-20th-century architecture of Walter Netsch. The work of Netsch’s studio at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in Chicago in the 1970s was densely cellular, with interiors composed of stacked polyhedral volumes. While many of these buildings were photographed by Ezra Stoller and other ‘high-modernist’ photographers, Netsch’s favourite photographer was the lesser-known Orlando Cabanban.8 Rather than focusing on the perfection of form, Cabanban typically attempted to capture multiple subjects within each frame, highlighting varied users and points of view. The exhibition reconstructed Cabanban's photographs of Netsch’s buildings as large three-dimensional image-objects. Each recomposed and transformed the space of Netsch’s interiors into a multitude of views and illusionary spaces. Any specific vantage point around the objects produced a unique recomposition of Cabanban’s photographs, evoking the multi-subjectivity of his work. The image-objects suggest that the significance of the architectural photograph is not limited to the singular view of the architect, rendering it more indeterminate and open to multiple views and potential subjectivities. Moving through the gallery yielded a constantly changing set of spaces. Like Andrea Pozzo’s frescos, the objects are one-point perspective projections, but they create seamlessly collaged, plastic spaces that are both pictorial and physical. The objects in ‘Views from the Field’ were architecturally scaled: taller than the viewer with an internal structure and palette of architectural materials. Working with industry partners and students at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), FreelandBuck fabricated inlaid surface panels composed of four distinct materials: wood veneer, aluminium, mirrored glass and cork. The panels, designed to

An unrolled array of each facet of one object, based on Cabanban’s photograph of the Basic Science Laboratory at the University of Iowa. The multitude of vectors and vanishing points in Netsch’s building are transformed and repeated around the object.

FreelandBuck designed and fabricated intricate inlaid finish panels which were then printed on a large-format flat-bed printer. The flush borders between materials trace the contours of the projected images, creating a set of composite graphic/physical material qualities once the panels were printed.

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function as both image substrates and architectural assemblies, were graphically printed with the projected photographs and assembled to produce the objects. The flush borders between physical materials trace the contours of material changes in the photographs, creating a composite set of graphic/physical material qualities that wrap around the objects. The negotiation between physical and graphic materials was designed much like an etching in which lines are cut into a metal plate before printing. Using a style-transfer machinelearning model, material swatch images of wood veneer, hammered concrete, terrazzo and carpet were rerendered ‘in the style of’ etchings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Albrecht Dürer. The dense patterns of lines that resulted were used to mask the projected image, effectively excising them from the print and revealing the substrate below. The resulting surfaces are composites of three distinct sets of material effects: the physical substrate, the etched mask and the printed image of Netsch’s wall, ceiling and floor finishes. This superimposition created a collapse of physical and illusory material that amplified the composite space of the gallery. FreelandBuck, ‘Views from the Field’ exhibition, SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles, California, September 2021 above: An intricate pattern of lines based on etchings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Albrecht Dürer was used to mask the print, effectively incising them from the printed photograph and revealing the physical substrate material below. right: The objects were each anchored by a graphic shadow projected onto the surrounding surfaces of the gallery. The printed imagery was constantly reframed by the contours of the objects and the shadows, incorporating the space of the gallery and allowing the viewer to cross the frame and enter the image. opposite: The printed surfaces of each object are a composite of three distinct layers of material: the physical substrate, the etched mask, and the printed imagery of Netsch’s interior finishes.

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This superimposition created a collapse of physical and illusory material that amplified the composite space of the gallery

‘Views from the Field’ is also a reconsideration of the image frame. From the contact sheet, to a photographic frame, to the Instagram grid, the grid is a reflexive boundary with centripetal and centrifugal forces separating artwork from the world around it.9 The image-objects open the frame, allowing the space of the world and the space of the image to comingle. Multiplied through a constantly shifting silhouette, the edge between virtual and real spaces is recalibrated through movement, mobilising the viewer. The layering of the foreground imagery onto the background of the gallery was further reinforced by projecting each photograph, as it registered on each object, onto the walls and floor of the gallery. This third projection allowed the viewer to cross the frame and enter the image, the middle ground between object and gallery.

The image-objects are convex, architectural objects that contain concave, pictorial spaces. They were designed to explore the range of representational capacities now open to architects – enabled by novel printing technologies and made more potent in the context of image-saturated contemporary visual culture. Alberti demonstrated that all architectural objects are simultaneously literal and representational; ‘Views from the Field’ is an attempt to explore this duality in a contemporary context. 1

Notes 1. Felix Burda-Stengel, Andrea Pozzo and Video Art, Saint Joseph’s University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1967, pp 1–3. 2. Marshall McLuhan, ‘Media Hot and Cold’, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Signet Books (New York), 1964, pp 22–32. 3. John May, ‘Everything Is Already an Image’, Log 40, Spring/Summer 2017, pp 9–26. 4. Hito Steyerl, ‘Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise’, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, Verso (London), 2017, pp 31–45. See also Shih-Syun Lin et al, ‘Patch-Based Image Warping for Content-Aware Retargeting’, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 15 (2), February 2013, and Mantang Guo et al, ‘Content-aware Warping for View Synthesis’, Arxiv, 22 January 2022: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09023. 5. Bruno Latour, ‘Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands’, Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, Vol 6, JAI Press (London), 1986, p 4. 6. Ibid, p 7. 7. Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1995, pp 337–49. 8. Betty J Blum, ‘Oral History of Walter Netsch’, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, The Art Institution of Chicago (Chicago, IL), 1997–2000, pp 413–14. 9. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, October, 9, Summer 1979, pp 50–64.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 40–1, 44, 45, 46(t), 47 © FreelandBuck; pp 42, 46(b) © Joshua White

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Jill Stoner

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Hsin-Yu Chen, Fleeing the Fire, ‘Wind, Machine, Animal’ MArch thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2016 Drought and climate change-induced windstorms from dry inland regions are main factors causing wildfires in places like California, Australia and British Columbia. Their unprecedented frequency and magnitude is felt across kingdoms, human and non-human.

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As our planet gets hotter, California suffers the devastating effects of increasingly large annual wildfires. However, in honouring the wisdom of the trees, Berkeley architecture professor and writer Jill Stoner describes how, contrary to popular belief, such pyrotechnic events have many advantages for ecological diversity.

According to Miwok legend,1 there were long ago two tribes in what is now known as the Central Valley in California. The Geese lived without fire high in the mountains, and suffered cold through the winter. Below were the Valley People who kept warm around a shared hearth; a raven perched atop their chimney to protect the precious fire. One night Tol-le-loo the mouse, one of the Geese, played his elderberry flutes to lull the Valley People in their communal house to sleep. He then cut a hole in the raven’s wing, and slipped through to steal some bits of fire, which he hid in the hollows of those very same flutes. In one version of the story, some flames from the fire were sent skyward to become the sun; the remaining pieces were placed deep in the trunks of cedars and buckeyes for safekeeping. And so was established an enduring kinship between California fire and California trees. In recent years, through the summer and autumn months, the world has been inundated and mesmerised by scenes of California burning. Trees and houses mostly made from trees engulfed in flame; orange skies shrouding smoky coastal cities. Environmental historian Stephen Pyne has characterised this period as the Pyrocene, scientific and undeniably apt.2 Had the iconic Hollywood producer and director Cecil B DeMille lived to see what we are up to, he might have opted for a name that sounds even more apocalyptic. Saving General Sherman Through the summer and autumn of 2021, as seasonal fires surged yet again through the forests of California, newscasts featured images of firefighters swaddling the lower trunk of a giant sequoia named General Sherman in aluminium blankets, as if they were shiny artificial bark. This new skin, more resistant to destructive temperatures, was specially formulated to protect the General and other sequoias from infernos like the one that raced across Tulare County.

After Paradise, Butte County, California, 2019 The architectural detritus of the Paradise fire suggests possible alternative design futures for sites ravaged by flames. We might misjudge this as a ruin; but it is a living landscape onto which new species might emerge, and to which future fires might contribute.

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General Sherman wrapped in aluminium, Sequoia National Park, California, September 2021 Wrapped in aluminium blankets, the attention paid to this giant sequoia named General Sherman speaks to our obsession with individual ‘monarch’ trees, and closely aligns with architecture’s own obsessions about authorship and objectification.

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Yet as Indigenous people have long known, fire is necessary to sustain a forest, and for the health of these arboreal giants, its denizens. It provides three things that the sequoias must have to continue to reproduce: clear air space, to allow sun and rain to penetrate the canopy; intense heat, which opens the cones and releases new seeds; and ground that is cleared of brush and leaves, thus offering seeds access to the moist soil within which they germinate. For Native Americans living in the western parts of what they call Turtle Island, fire was not forest management, but a form of preventive forest medicine. They set intentional periodic fires (now called ‘cultural burns’) and attended them closely, as part of a complex strategy for maintaining the wellbeing of the forest ecosystem. But beginning in the 1860s, following the white settlers’ wars on Native American culture, these healthy fires were made criminal and punishable. Thus space between the giant trees filled with dead wood and dried leaves, creating the tinderboxes we now know so well. ‘The fixed is the world without fire,’ wrote Annie Dillard in 1974.3 Fixed might be construed as dead, fire as part of the world’s breath, and fire suppression as a kind of suffocation. Here is the terrible irony: in eradicating the traditional practice of beneficent fires, we unwittingly cultivated fire in a much more dangerous and wild form. Today, the wisdom of cultural burning is again being acknowledged.4 In 2019, 160 hectares (400 acres) surrounding General Sherman were defensively burned. The General and his mates safely survived the 2021 fire season; but not for the luxury of their aluminium skin. The Paradox of Paradise Over the past two decades, California’s fierce wildfires have become more than a wake-up call; they are for the foreseeable

Rebuilding Paradise, Butte County, California, 2019 In the three years since this photograph was taken, Paradise is rebuilding not only for those who lost their homes to the Camp Fire, but for younger families moving here from out-of-state, pursuing a familiar but woefully outdated version of the California dream.

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future a predictable annual presence in our dream state. They rampage through landscapes that were once the scenes of a euphoric Gold Rush; they terrorise the Hollywood hills and canyons of movie-star fantasies; they devour the interstitial zone between wild land and Silicon Valley cities. And in 2018, the Camp Fire burned Paradise to the ground. In the Sierra foothills of Butte County, the town of Paradise grew over the past several decades into a bucolic mountain community of 25,000. In autumn 2018 the entire town was incinerated, and 85 residents lost their lives. It is impossible to know how many animals perished. Now, four years later, thousands of new houses are sprouting across the blackened hillsides, and property values are on the rise. The town is determined to be Paradise once again, defiantly, reimagined and marketed according to new building standards that promise to reduce the risk of future destruction by the fires that are sure to keep coming. Fire may scare us witless, yet it seems not to scare us sufficiently from choosing to inhabit places that tell us we might not belong there. Instead, we return to charred ground determined to try yet again to outwit it. The California Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) Code,5 which Paradise is the first town to officially adopt, takes a two-pronged approach to suppression of future fires: keeping flammable materials a prescribed distance away from buildings, and constructing buildings of fire-resistant material. (Both prongs seem more in the interest of protecting property than saving lives.) We pour concrete pads for the next wave of new houses, much larger than the ones that burned. Each of these houses is surrounded by sterile, non-flammable aprons; new trees are kept back at a ‘safe’ distance, and roads are widened in anticipation of the next evacuation order. These codes help to rationalise the familiar postfire mantra: ‘Yes, of course we will rebuild.’

Architecture’s Debt, Fire’s Future and the Wisdom of Trees The Oakland Hills fire of 1991 marked an inflection point, with unanticipated repercussions from lucrative fire insurance payouts. With almost everyone who lost a home determined to rebuild, the fire’s aftermath became a boom time for California Bay Area architects. They proceeded to further violate the recently decimated hillside with foundation piles driven 18 metres (60 feet) deep or more; the houses atop them favoured footprints that nearly maxed-out the potential of building lots with maximum architecture. Thirty years later, environmental and social discourses have radically changed for the better; yet the architectural response to the aftermath of wildfire has mostly remained the same. Immediately following the 2018 Paradise fire, poet Molly Fisk made an inventory of the sources of particulates that composed the eerie smoke-filled air. Her list evokes the material specifications for any conventional building project:

Hsin-Yu Chen, Wind-Powered Wildlife Rescue, ‘Wind, Machine, Animal’ MArch thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2016 Chen’s architectural thesis project merges imaginative non-fossil-fuel technologies with the pathos of animals trapped by fire. These rescue missions, though fanciful, suggest one of many potential languages for the new architectures of the Pyrocene.

R-13 insulation. Paint, inside and out. The liquor store's plastic letters in puddled colors below their charred sign. Each man-made sole of every shoe in all those closets. The laundromat's washers' round metal doors. But then Arco, Safeway, Walgreens, the library – everything they contained. How many miles of electrical wire and PVC pipe swirling into the once-blue sky: how many linoleum acres?6

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‘In ancient times, the trees talked to one another.’ Surely contemporary trees sense the perils at our doorstep. If we listen closely enough, we may hear them speaking in defence of fire now

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This is architecture’s Pyrocene legacy: toxic products produced through the burning of fossil fuels, with the mnemonics of industry branding, packaged to appeal to a culture of consumption heavily inclined towards excess. The convergent crises of our time – climate change, resource depletion, income inequality and corporate exploitation – send a clear message: pay down the debt accumulated through decades of profligate construction. There is design work to be done in these ravaged landscapes: some of it subtractive, perhaps inclined towards an ethics and aesthetics of austerity. In this context, we might recognise fire not as an alien force that has to be constrained, nor an enemy that must be defeated, but as an ally. Many of California’s trees, collectively or individually, are legendary; yet California’s wilderness is itself a mythic construction. Ansel Adams’ pristine black-and-white photographs of Yosemite National Park, and John Muir’s essays on the picturesque landscape of the Sierras,7 are a byproduct of Manifest Destiny – the grand settler project that purged the American west of both native knowledge keepers and the fires that were a fundamental part of their world. Thus was created yet another scale of space for future generations to consume. A bit of wisdom from Indigenous scholar Robin Kimmerer: ‘In ancient times, the trees talked to one another.’8 Surely contemporary trees sense the perils at our doorstep. If we listen closely enough, we may hear them speaking in defence of fire now. 1 Postscript: Mike Davis on California Burning With the passing of Mike Davis on 25 October 2022, California lost one of its most profound writers and insightful environmental critics. His 1998 book Ecology of Fear contains a prophetic chapter titled ‘The Case for Letting Malibu Burn’. Republished with a postscript two decades later, immediately following the Paradise fire, his deep analysis probes not only the ecological consequences of fire suppression and subsequent rebuilding, but also their economic underpinnings.9 Jill Stoner, An Overstory Future, 2022 Overdevelopment has tipped the balance in the California landscape. Perhaps one day, when cultural fires have restored a modicum of equilibrium, us humans will retreat into an overstory of highly resilient urban conifers.

Notes 1. https://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/How_Tol-le-loo_Stole_Fire-Miwok.html. 2. Stephen Pyne, The Pyrocene, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2022. 3. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, HarperCollins (New York), 1974, p 69. 4. Casey Kuhn, ‘“Fire is medicine”: How Indigenous Practices Could Help Curb Wildfires’, PBSO News Hour, 23 July 2021: www.pbs.org/newshour/science/fire-is-medicine-howindigenous-practices-could-help-curb-wildfires. 5. www.redwoodcity.org/departments/fire-department/fire-prevention/defensible-space/ california-wildland-urban-interface-code-information. 6. Molly Fisk, ‘Particulate Matter’, 2018: https://poets.org/poem/particulate-matter. 7. For example, see John Muir, Wilderness Essays, Gibbs Smith (Salt Lake City, UT), 2015. 8. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions (Minneapolis, MN), 2013, pp 19–20. 9. See https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 48–9, 53 © Hsin-Yu Chen; p 50 Image courtesy of Josh Wallace; p 51 © Gary Kazanjian / Getty Images; p 52 ©  John W McDonough / Getty Images; pp 54–5 © Jill Stoner

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Nicole Meyer

DO DREAM LANDSCAPES

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Preliminary Research Office, All Over the Place, A+D Museum, Los Angeles, California, 2020 Developed in phases, the 32-foot (9.8-metre) long model is comprised of 11 ‘chunks’, the two ends capable of meeting to form a continuous loop. Without dictating a clear beginning, end or markers for scale, PRO invites viewers to contribute their own narrative and meaning to the panoramic installation. Preliminary Research Office (PRO), All Over the Place, A+D Museum, Los Angeles, California, 2020 Developed in phases, the 32-foot (9.8-metre) long model is comprised of 11 ‘chunks’, the two ends capable of meeting to form a continuous loop. Without dictating a clear beginning, end, or markers for scale, PRO invites viewers to contribute their own narrative and meaning to the panoramic installation.

HAVE EARTHQUAKES?

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Once there was a certainty about the world and how architecture might be created and read. Nicole Meyer, archivist at Morphosis, believes this is no longer true, and that individual perspectives and the navigation of reality and various media platforms is akin to dreaming, causing an evolving plasticity in our perceptions of architecture. She investigates these propositions through the work of LA-based Preliminary Research Office.

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The way we experience space, time and architecture has irrevocably changed somehow and some reassessment is necessary. We have passed a threshold where subjective ordering of reality has superseded the notion of a shared objective world. Contrary to 20th-century prophesies of total reification, we have arrived at something strangely like its opposite: a state more akin to dreaming, where people move as dreamers through shimmering personal worlds, oscillating between total control over and total scepticism of narrative, meaning and phenomena. Grappling with this new condition drives the origin story of Preliminary Research Office (PRO). Like all California stories, this one starts elsewhere. PRO was founded by Yaohua Wang in New York in 2014. Chloe Brunner joined as partner in 2016. This is a California story in the sense that both partners graduated from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), then Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), two years apart, working between degrees with various storied Los Angeles firms (Wang with Wes Jones and Oyler Wu, and Brunner at Morphosis), and are now back working from LA on projects local, international and nowhere (in the sense of placeagnostic experiments exhibited physically and virtually). You can see their work on their Instagram, a provisional archive ordering the embryonic growth of a firm into a story. Like most firms, PRO operates in the context of the uncanny demand of present media platforms to narrate their work and its consequences in real time. More than ever before, architectural practice – especially emerging practice – is being asked to show and tell itself right now, for work to be ordered immediately into a coherent narrative. We all feel this demand too, either directly or through its effects, the way it is leeching into physical reality, tweaking the pace and flow of time. But Wang has been trying to jump out of time, to get us to feel the texture and give and plasticity

of it, to test the components of that artificial jellied atmosphere and to identify its actors, structural elements, primitives. PRO is an expanding play on this. Because architects deal in physical space and the experience of it, Wang sees the question ‘What is reality?’ or, more specifically, ‘What is reality to us, now?’ as one of the basic concerns of architecture. The duality of virtual reality versus physical reality is tired and not quite right; how can we understand the condition of simultaneously occupying multiple realities superimposed on top of each other, bleeding into each other, each reality as valid as the next? Wang will argue that we require a new way of thinking about physical space – that we need to shed 20th-century models by examining how our relationship to reality has changed in the last 50 years. Working to first principles, PRO starts from the position that reality is both subjective and mediated by technology, format, place and narrative; or, to put it differently, that there is no appreciable difference between reality and the stories we use to navigate it, and our storytelling techniques and operations are personal, many and evolving. Both partners take this as obvious, the plasticity of reality made clearer by time spent immersed in the narratives of other countries and second languages – Wang growing up in Shanxi, China, witnessing a rapidly evolving urban landscape,

and Brunner moving between Israel and a series of home makeovers in the California communities of Santa Monica, Venice and Malibu, each house full of new childhood worlds. It is not just about passive immersion in narrative, though; Brunner explains that design is like a chance to operate on reality, to modulate it to someone specifically, to their life, their habits, their psychological experience, to make space as a feedback loop of stories.1 Building a design practice also always involves operations on reality, whether designers acknowledge them as such or not. PRO’s nascent work can be viewed eponymously, as ‘preliminary research’ exercises in exploring different operations; at this point in their practice, project, fiction, medium, format, representation, reference, method – they are all in flux, part of researching a new toolbox for architecture for a future landscape we all are collectively dreaming into place. Sequence Jump in anywhere and sequence starts rearranging time into truth before your eyes. Reality is in order; the present architecture of California is the ultimate architecture of California, the inevitable product of all earlier work. Sequence is an operation of narrative, maybe the basic operation of narrative; we use it to organise our experience of reality into meaningful

The present architecture of California is the ultimate architecture of California, the inevitable product of all earlier work

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stories of causality. When architectural writers organise architects occupying the same space into meaningful sequences, they create the story of a place. When architects organise space into sequences, they too are dealing with questions of reality – what can happen here and how will it be experienced? When architects organise architecture into sequences of models, what kind of reality is produced? In their 2020 installation All Over the Place at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles, PRO exhibited one of Wang’s intricate experiments in the superposition of multiple realities. It was a model, but not really – more a model of a model, a hyperbolic study of the three realities models stage simultaneously (as a representation read; an object encountered in space; and an exhibit exhibited). Thirty-two feet (9.8 metres) long, laid out at eye level, the model was a white bar of intertwining volumes and elements torn from architectural vernaculars and brought together again more dynamically, playfully. Too much to take in all at once, the model demanded to be read sequentially, with an implied temporal dimension like a scroll or 19th-century panorama. Instead of experiencing the model as a passive vehicle of time, viewers were invited to see themselves as active participants in shaping reality/ ies. Missing cues like scale figures, its start and end points ambiguous, the installation encouraged visitors to draft their own stories out of the sequences or imaginatively travel through the model as they walked along its length. Sequence, linearity and time are commonly conflated in descriptions of reality, but not always and especially not recently; many art forms and media take advantage of nonlinear narrative sequences and timelines to emphasise different aspects of a story. Technology facilitates our control of time. Before the internet, the material qualities of film gave cinematographers new power: the ‘cut’ operation transformed time and space into sequence and speed, mediums of narrative.

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Preliminary Research Office, All Over the Place, A+D Museum, Los Angeles, California, 2020 Details and sequences of an inhabitable or nonhabitable model-object-building of any scale imagined by the viewer. That is to say, architecture is not innate within the object but within the scale.

Instead of experiencing the model as a passive vehicle of time, viewers were invited to see themselves as active participants in shaping reality/ies

Preliminary Research Office, House on Busch, Malibu, California, 2022

above: A new residence for a painter, designed as, around and through framed views into real, imagined and unoccupiable spaces. A place now and a place in progress.

right: The renderings for this new residence were approached through their quality as standalone simulacra – a house and its ghost. PRO asks: Can you see digital space as an equal to physical space and explore its independent qualities?

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This notion of playing with linearity underscores PRO’s approach to two recent residential projects. House on Busch (2022) and House on Harvester (due for completion 2025) are new dwellings in Los Angeles, one a spec house on a coastal hillside, and the other for an artist client. Like All Over the Place, each project utilises a method of shaping space based on a series of interrelating primitives, creating unusual conditions that feel unscripted but not confusing, the interrelationships made legible to the

Preliminary Research Office, Portrait of a Sphere, 2018 A sphere studied through GIF stills in sequence – a drawing manner maybe more natural and definitely more transmissible than conventional drawing types.

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visitor. Movement through the houses is suggested by responsive forms and layered views into other spaces. At least, early in their design, that is how one imagined moving through the houses: when viewing PRO’s careful studies and representations, before their construction you could already float through polished semblances of them, sequences of ‘photographs’ of digital spaces rendered realistically along a physically impossible course, passing through mirrors, across water, squeezed through glass

block, suddenly finding yourself in front of the painting that you had glimpsed from a distance through a window reflecting the trees. The spatial narratives, exquisite textures of surfaces and objects and attention to sense-based details in these renderings are so accurate, you feel there. PRO is coaxing us, in a way, to recognise that this alternative digital space is as real a version of this place as most of us will ever experience, the public ghost of private physical realities.

Preliminary Research Office, House on Harvester, Malibu, California, due for completion 2025 Plan for a spec house designed for a specific generic future inhabitant; a place for specific stories, with characters, motives and actions to be determined.

PRO is coaxing us, in a way, to recognise that this alternative digital space is as real a version of this place as most of us will ever experience, the public ghost of private physical realities 63

Simultaneity According to Wang, the conventional way of experiencing place as a specific space in time has radically evolved: now, place is more understood as a specific image in space. As a result, Wang suggests, place and time are decoupled and destabilised, as all images produced throughout the world and throughout history have become resources for any architect to engage with.2 Simultaneity is possible as never before. The current generation has taken the artificiality of time as vernacular. Our day-to-day experience is perforated by asynchronous information in all forms of media; we swim in it, recorded fragments dragging at our fingertips to prove, underscore, enliven any point we

Preliminary Research Office, Bulging Walls – competition design for new Bauhaus Museum, Dessau-Roßlau, Germany, 2015 PRO approached the design of a new museum for the Bauhaus more as big objects in play, rather than as a building. The notion behind this strategy: buildings are already imbued with a concept, but objects in space are free from preconceived narratives.

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are trying to communicate. PRO narrows in on the GIF as the cinematic operation of our time: a purified sequence uncoupled from narrative, available for remixing by anybody in any context, economic, fast and compelling. In its architectural rendition, as in their 2019 series Portrait of a Sphere, PRO’s GIFs are an animated drawing fragment lifted from a project, capturing the slide between section cuts or plans. Freed from the context of building, they are loosed on digital platforms as entities in their own right. Interestingly, the GIFs in PRO’s case emerge from a practical problem: one of their first commissions was an intervention into a proposed multitower development. Creating symbolic and functional connections, PRO

contributed a sky bridge between the two tower volumes, morphing smoothly between conditions at either end. Documenting this morphing form involves a subtly evolving sequence of section drawings, suggesting an animation that becomes an operation applied to other projects, which then propagates easily and virally across social media platforms primed to deliver ideas in this way. Superposition The law of superposition holds that if an area of earth has not been deformed greater than 90 degrees, you can assume that older things will lie beneath newer things. This is an axiomatic law of any of the digging sciences – geology, archaeology,

palaeontology – a ‘ground-breaking’ proposition by 17th-century Danish anatomist-naturalist-bishop Nicolas Steno, who also happens to have been responsible for demoting the heart to a muscle like any other, from its previous glory as the body’s centre of warmth as proposed by Descartes. By this law, modernity has mapped time sensibly onto space. If you are digging in one place, you are going backwards in time. If you are rising, you must be going forwards. The only exception to this system that the nice, straightforward earth experiences is bioturbation, in which animals move things in and across the layers. If you have freed elements from their original context and timeline, and you lay them on each other, are you creating something like a fictional history, an alternative timeline? Is architecture bioturbation? In one of PRO’s first projects as a firm, a 2015 competition proposal for the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau-Roßlau, Germany, the idea of superposition as an operation is taken down to its basic principles (incidentally a perfect tribute to the spirit of the Bauhaus). Volumes and massing superimposed on other shapes suggest causal relationships – this form drags on this one, this space is pregnant with that one. The project seems to ask: What does it actually take to suggest a story here, and then occupy it? Do you even need events to create a history, or can you imply a kind of history out of the superposition of volumes themselves? Then, if you occupy it, does it make it real? Simulation Does anything feel really real now, or at least feel more real than something else? What did realness feel like? Can we simulate it? Was a feeling of realness always a product of simulation, the coherence of a modelled world to a larger one, and the absence of that feeling the result of simulations no longer cohering so well, all vying for precedence? PRO isolates these jostling predicaments for study under glass in the ongoing project A World’s World and the World, begun in 2021 and Wang’s most complex operational study so

Preliminary Research Office, A World’s World and the World, 2021– Designed as a virtual work with the potential to be physically installed, this ongoing iterative study touches on the strange reality of contemporary space: that it feels unreal everywhere. This tension is studied in the overlay of three scales: microscopic, abstract and objective.

far – a compelling, cosmological exploration of simulated worlds, one within another within another. It is a model of a system of elements, something like a landscape or maybe a penjing, within a rotating system of lights, a heliodon for a fictional world. A room-sized installation originally intended for a cancelled biennale, its reality is held across probability and digital representations, where, face it, most of us would be experiencing it anyway, as real as it ever will be. In fault-riddled California, where the strata have never offered a linear record of time, vying simulations are taken for granted – right from the start the architectural landscape is formed out of fantasies of other places and

timelines, dragged here alongside, within and on top of each other. California has had an outsize influence on the 21st-century dreamstate; unrealness grows here in spades, and we export to the rest of the world via Hollywood stories or Silicon Valley technologies. If this is our world, we must try to understand it to design for it. Testing the quality and shaping of reality, PRO is resurveying the territory. 1 Notes 1. In conversation with the author. 2. Ibid.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 56–7, 60 © Jasmine Park Photography; pp 61–5 © Preliminary Research Office

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Heather Flood and Aaron Gensler

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Erin Wright, The Game, 2021 Wright’s buildings are mesmerising, composed of materials that are inhumanly flat, compelling the viewer to lean into her work to see its depth. Lighting is anything but warm, and the compositions are so aggressively shallow that the viewer feels as though the objects depicted may fall right out of the frame.

EXTRADISCIPLINARY DREAMS JOURNEYS INTO THE FOOTHILLS Erin Wright, In Progress for Servants in the Garden, 2021 Through a skilled renderer, Wright painstakingly paints her images. Each perfect brick, each identically textured stick of wood and each blade of grass is manifested by hand, not processor, asking the beholder to question its authorship.

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Over the years, architects have experimented with cross-disciplinary practices, techniques and concepts to enable them to push the boundaries of their work. At the Woodbury School of Architecture, faculty and students are actively encouraged to take this path. Interim Dean Heather Flood and Chair Aaron Gensler describe some recent successful work and its various individual preoccupations.

Paulette Singley, Tovaglia (‘Tablecloth’) (detail), ‘Open Studios’, American Academy in Rome, Italy, 2021 Detail showing a map of Rome’s Topography (after WB Clarke’s Plan of Ancient Rome, 1877). The hand-drawn history of Rome conveys an impression of place through the documentation of culinary practices over time. Serving as a table covering, Tovaglia transforms prosaic dinner conversation into a historical drama.

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California Dreaming is a longing for freedom of action, a craving for community of independent spirits, and a thirst for pleasure in creativity. A place of abundance and beauty, of warmth and wealth. Economic opportunities, ripe for the taking, transformed social status from a fixed condition into an evolving reflection of effort over time. However, on the hardscrabble path to dreamland, other possibilities have emerged. California Dreaming measures quality of life by its style and suggests that the joy of working breeds success. To dream is to bring the subconscious into light – a hazy comprehension felt as much as understood. A mind at peace with ambiguity, recomposing fragments of the known into the unforeseen. The three practices highlighted here flourish in an unencumbered environment where architecture is defined in the making. One theorist, one designer and one artist – all three are professors at the Woodbury School of Architecture (WSOA). A small, private university, Woodbury is situated on a beautiful campus in the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains on the border of Los Angeles. The creative pulse of California Dreaming is sustained by a diverse architectural community. California, a state that celebrates progress, recognises the value of inclusivity. To be inclusive is to be open to alternatives to the status quo. To invite foreign ideas and foreign actors into the establishment. Architecture that is curious about craft, fearlessly entangled in other disciplines, and critical of existing power structures is inclusive. The creative practices of Paulette Singley, Heather Scott Peterson and Erin Wright open up architecture, expanding its material composition and its intellectual matter. Informed but not bound by disciplinary confines, they inhabit the beyond. A creative space at play with disparate branches of knowledge. While their drawings, objects and paintings are not architecture canonically, they are architectural – conjuring new futures for the built environment informed by extra-disciplinary undertakings.

Paulette Singley, Intercenales, ‘Open Studios’, American Academy in Rome, Italy, 2022 An assemblage of culinary artefacts, including animal bones, sheets of pasta folded into architectural models, and proper dinnerware are placed on top of a tablecloth that depicts the culinary history of Rome. The installation suggests that guests will soon be arriving to revel in the sensual rediscovery of a city once familiar.

The Theorist Paulette Singley is a writer, designer and educator whose veracious cultural critiques reveal truths hidden in plain sight. Her work surfs the perimeter of culture for allied practices that illuminate connections between objects and the constructed environment. Fashion, food and film are all fodder for the construction of histories, theories and artefacts that expand our understanding of architecture. Her appetite for promiscuous intellect, to flirt with strangers, yields intimate encounters where there once were none. California’s Locavore culinary traditions and agricultural infrastructure inspired Singley’s research into the topographic trajectory of meals. Her work illustrates how the geography of food production, the choreography of food preparation, and the sensations of food consumption form the contours of spatial ephemera that emerge at the intersection of architecture and eating. In 2004, she coedited the book Eating Architecture with Jamie Horowitz. The foreward states ‘we propose that the rituals of dining, the design of meals, and the process of cookery form and inform a distinctly expressive architecture’.1 Well-versed in the relationship between food and architecture, Singley’s 2020 Rome Prize project ‘Preserving Perishables: Strategies for Conserving the Cultural History of Cuisine in Contemporary Rome’ documents Roman food traditions. Two pieces of work render a historical impression of place, informed by values evident in the sustenance of its people. Showcased at the American Academy of Rome ‘Open Studios’ event in 2021, Tovaglia, or ‘Tablecloth’, narrates

the source, distribution and consumption of meals throughout ancient Rome. Using lead and watercolour, Singley illustrates the beauty and flavour of ancient Rome with improvisation. Her work is akin to a chef preparing a meal from specific ingredients and exact measurements calibrated to personal taste. The wiggle of the pencil line, the dark patches of poche where lead strokes overlap, the incongruence of scale where a fennel bulb is larger than a piazza all suggest a mind at work attempting to comprehend a condition. A recording of sensual experience that informs an individual impression of the past, Singley’s Tovaglia is a delectable pairing of medium and message. By drawing instead of writing history, she has collapsed the figural and intellectual, the formal and conceptual into a single artefact. Tovaglia presents history in a nonsequential, polyvalent, sensual manner. Foregoing didactic instruction, it gives a taste of the past that lingers on the tongue, inspiring a hunger for what the future can become. Also featured in the 2021 ‘Open Studios’ was Singley’s Intercenales installation, the staging of a dinner party as the means to conjure truth from fiction, and in so doing, highlight folklore as means of fact-checking historical records. Based on Leon Battista Alberti’s Intercenales (1424–39) compilation of fantastical short stories about the relationship between virtue and luck that is meant to be read between courses of meal,2 the elements of Singley’s installation, including the servings of bone, the plan drawing of a carcass and pasta folded into architectural shapes, provide intellectual fodder for creative interpretations of ancient Rome.

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The Designer Heather Scott Peterson is more at home in the arid landscape of the Salton Sea than behind a desk. An immediacy with the material world is central to her work, informed by intimate engagement and curiosity with natural processes. Peterson seeks to understand the behaviour of materials in the natural world to harness their limits for artistic production. Inspired by the savage geographic terrain of Southern California, her recent work translates earth processes into dishware. These strange objects suggest but do not promise use. The porcelain Gastrula vessels (2021) fit in the hand and sit on the table. However, the thick and heavy foundation of the vessel skews balance as it rotates to pour liquid into the mouth. A stoneware disc is neither plate nor bowl. While its shallow trough cradles liquid, the rim elongates into a wafer-thin irregular surface for items such as a slab of butter to rest on. The stretched-dough texture of the surface captures sediment from the food, recording the meal as it is consumed. The rasp of a knife being dragged across the chalky rim of a plate, the aroma captured in divots on the surface of the rim, and the wobbly rate of extraction when pouring from a lopsided cup activate senses otherwise dulled. The experience of dining is intensified, thrilling in its precariousness. While Peterson’s dishware accentuates the choreography of eating, her dining environments set a backdrop for communal connection. She co-hosts the Margaret Mead roaming supper club in Los Angeles where food preparation is the means of crafting environment. This monthly gastronomic event is also a creative salon for faculty and local creatives, providing a backdrop for intimate exchanges that transform colleagues into a community. Blood-stained leather becomes the cloth for the table, the spark and intensity of the grill flame is calibrated for illumination, and the aroma of sediment captured by the tableware sinks into memory. In 2020, Peterson collaborated with visual artist and set designer Anna Heymowska on the design of Petri, a Stockholm restaurant where they transformed the interior of an existing building into a theatre for dining. Materials are reimagined into exacting elements that stage food and compose atmosphere, designed through full-scale material mock-ups until they were satisfied that the objects and the space embody the precision, subtlety and craft happening in the kitchen. The supper club and the restaurant share a purpose: to produce a universe of interrelated material details that immerse individuals in an environment that imprints a bespoke communal experience into memory. The materialist obsessions of Peterson are rooted in her ability to transmutate the essence of things. There is no tolerance for trickery or sleight of hand in her work. She does not impersonate one material with another. Rather, she stretches the limits of what a given material can form when its natural tendencies are tethered to new functional constraints. And in turn, what experiential qualities emerge when function is elevated to art.

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Heather Scott Peterson, Gastrula vessels, 2021 The porcelain vessels are intended to contain a consommé to be consumed in a communal tea-ceremony setting. The irregularity of the form intensifies engagement with the cup as hands cusp the smooth shell while lips absorb the chalky texture.

The materialist obsessions of Peterson are rooted in her ability to transmutate the essence of things

Heather Scott Peterson and Anna Heymowska, Petri restaurant, Stockholm, Sweden, 2020 opposite: The fine-dining restaurant was designed for renowned chef Petter Nilsson. The designers worked like tailors in shaping the space, including custom furniture, casework, lighting fixtures and hardware at full scale.

Heather Scott Peterson, Moment from Margaret Mead supper club, China Town, Los Angeles, California, September 2019 right: The blood from raw meat stains leather, producing a decorative table cloth for a supper club dinner.

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Wright’s fanatical devotion to early technical representation trademarks transforms the very inelegance of her subject matter into objects of fetish instead of expressions of technical limitation The Artist Erin Wright has a budding architectural practice and a painting studio housed in the back room of her gallery, Winston’s, in the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Lincoln Heights. Her paintings, to an audience unfamiliar with architectural representation, may seem like just paintings. As seen in The Game or Four Bitten Fruit (both 2021), her colour palette and framing echo the tropes of a classic still life. The art connoisseur may note the juxtaposition of naturalistic elements such as dogs, butterflies and an assortment of fruit, flora and fauna, the sensual curves of which are strikingly offset by architectural forms – fanatically orthogonal buildings, structures and architectural materials. Her backgrounds are often minimal to counterbalance her surreally precious, achingly detailed objects. To those who are familiar with the brief history of digital architectural representation, her work, taken as a whole, is both an embodiment of fundamental professional sacrilege and an achievement few, if any, architects could technically achieve. At the end of the last millennium, architectural representation witnessed a transformation from an analogue pursuit to a predominately digital medium. We saw new methods and techniques marked by crudely realised efforts and stymied by the relative infancy of representational software, hardware limitations, and the fact that those who grappled with the technology were doing something new in our otherwise ancient profession. The epicentre of this innovation was Los Angeles, crossing the boundaries of entertainment and architecture. Like CGI in films of this era, the results were underwhelming by modern standards and current practice. Lighting was harsh and cold, and perspective was isometric or axonometric simply because of software limitations. Gaussian blur and environmental fog were not yet invented, and bloom lighting was just starting to be deployed by the wizards at Pixar. Textures were flat and materials felt more plastic

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Erin Wright, Four Bitten Fruit, 2021 Here, the composition of elements elucidates a story, the relics of a life lived, flirting with architectural representation and ideas of scale. A just-extinguished flame of the candle and freshly cut fruit dwarf the intentionally misaligned framing of the architectural models and the fallen pawn of half-constructed and half-played game tease us with symbolism and surrealism.

than their real-life counterparts. Foliage was unconvincing when such high polygon count forms were even attempted, due to those limitations that deprived images of greenery and removed the human element – the relics of a life lived – from architectural representation and in doing so divorced the work from its scale. Wright’s paintings reclaim the tenor of those early, ambitious, clumsy renderings. These depictions are both shockingly beautiful and enduringly masterful in their technical achievement. The first hallmark, beauty, is achieved by reintroducing scale and humanity through the inclusion of those elements (as we see blades of grass, a dog, a supple peach taking shape in the image of Servants in the Garden (2021)), which the renderings she honours could not technically include. In doing so, both scale and humanity are reintroduced without compromising the surreal nature and perspective of alluded representations of the past. Wright’s fanatical devotion to early technical representation trademarks transforms the very inelegance of her subject matter into objects of fetish instead of expressions of technical limitation. This affords her paintings a timelessness that their inspiration could never have achieved, thus capturing relative immortality. The Beyond Singley, Scott Peterson and Wright have an appetite for self-determination not subjugated by a single discipline. Creative freedom, communal experience and personal pleasure are palpable in their work as they emulsify disciplinary threads, confect conversations, and relish in the labour of their craft. California Dreaming is a wistful notion about an ideal state. The California women described in this article are not dreaming, they are doing. Full-scale and hand-made, their architectural practices conceive the unknown and render the unforeseen, bringing that dream ever closer to fruition. 1 Notes 1. Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley (eds), Eating Architecture, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004, p 5. 2. Leon Battista Alberti, Intercenales: Editio minor, tr Maria Letizia Bracciali Magnini, Polistampa (Florence), 2022.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 66–7, 72–3 © Photos by Keegan Kruse; pp 68–9 © Paulette Singley; pp 70–71 © Heather Scott Peterson

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THE PICTURE AND THE FRAME Grace Mitchell Tada

UNDERSTANDING A CONTESTED LANDSCAPE

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The Californian terrain is formed of many ‘contested landscapes’ – by different communities, the advantaged and the disadvantaged. San Francisco-based writer Grace Mitchell Tada describes the work of architect, artist, designer and educator Walter Hood and his studio’s forays into these difficult areas.

Hood Design Studio, People’s Park, University of California, Berkeley, due for completion 2024 previous spread: At a historic site in Berkeley known for its role in the Free Speech Movement, Hood Design Studio is designing the landscape surrounding a new dormitory being constructed on the site. Walter Hood took on the contentious project to shed light on the multidimensionality of the site – to insist that student housing can exist simultaneous to its histories.

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The block four streets south of the University of California, Berkeley, campus has long sat empty of development. Nonetheless, many people live there. Among a smattering of trees and patches of yellowing grass, a dozen or so tents, in fluctuating numbers, cluster at the block’s eastern edge. Filling the space are also office chairs, piles of clothes and filled black trash bags, and fixtures from commercial kitchens. A handful of people sitting in chairs survey the scene. It is a benign early June day, and a passerby could easily miss the subtle dismantling underway. Downhill of the encampment, in the middle of the grassy block, stand several large blue dumpsters. Around noon, several masked and gloved individuals pull up in a pickup truck. One walks into the encampment, pauses at a folding table, lifts it overhead, and carries it to the edge of the park. Colleagues haul over a plastic laundry basket, a crate and containers next to the table. One wears a navy shirt, the university’s yellow emblem at the breast. This piecemeal clearing is one of the first visible acts in the university’s controversial decision to transform the parcel – the historic People’s Park – into a site for student

Hood Design Studio, Solar Strand, Buffalo, New York, 2012 In one of their iconic landscape projects, the studio harnessed an array of 5,000 photovoltaic panels to create a space that is simultaneously infrastructure and a new landscape.

Hood Design Studio, The Crying Rock and Santa Monica, Santa Monica, California, 2022 When creating this sandstone artwork, Hood looked to the surrounding landscape for material inspiration. Through its material, the piece nods to both indigenous and colonial constructions of space.

housing. The project began decades ago, in 1967, when the university first cleared the land of the existing houses using rights of eminent domain, evicting all who lived within them.1 In 1969, a group of frustrated activist-led volunteers came together to build a park, coalescing with the energy of activism and protest of 1960s Berkeley – it was the era of anti-Vietnam War sentiments, the Free Speech Movement and the Black Panthers.2 Twenty-four days later, the university’s attempt to demolish the park was met with protest. Law enforcement turned violent, shooting dozens and killing one.3 In the coming days, 3,000 National Guard troops descended on Berkeley, teargassing and arresting hundreds as tens of thousands of people marched in support of the park.4 The university never developed the parcel; People’s Park remained. ‘In most people’s minds, People’s Park is a product of free speech,’ says Walter Hood, who, leading his Oakland, California-based design firm Hood Design Studio is designing the landscape surrounding the new student housing, the building being designed by Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects. To many, the park continues to represent a manifest and beloved example of California counter-

culture: ‘It’s not,’ says Hood. ‘It's actually a product of urban renewal.’ That multidimensionality of history, and its misconceptions, drew Hood to the maligned project, slated for completion in 2024. Hood is one of the foremost individuals in the world of landscape design. He has made a name producing projects of unwavering vision and ambition to truth-tell that fall under the category of landscape architecture, like the gardens at San Francisco’s de Young Museum (2005), the Broad Museum Plaza (2015) in Los Angeles, and the Solar Strand (2012) in Buffalo, New York, as well as for his body of artwork. Some of his artwork converses with the landscape, like Shadowcatcher (2012), in Charlottesville, Virginia, as it foregrounds an African-American burial site, or The Crying Rock and Santa Monica (2022), which harnesses the city’s sandstone to coalesce both its cultural and geological history. His Black Towers/Black Power featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s 2021 exhibition ‘Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America’. In 2019 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and the prestigious Gish Award.

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Hood, who is black, does not shy away from projects that interrogate cultural norms and paradigms; in fact, it is precisely the untold and obscured cultural and ecological histories embedded in the American landscape that drive his interests. Which is in part why many – including his students at Berkeley – have questioned his role in the People’s Park project, one that looks like the university overrunning its town, especially at the expense of its unhoused residents. The university has promised to provide housing to anyone living in the park who wants it, and there will be supportive housing on site. Critics are sceptical that promises will materialise. When asked why he pursued the project, Hood names his studio manager, Alma Du Solier: ‘Well, Alma said, if we don’t do it, somebody’s going to do it and fuck it up.’ He laughs. ‘There’s the hubris of Hood Design – like, “we can do it better than anyone else”.’ Like many of the studio’s projects, this one is in what Hood calls a ‘contested landscape’. Simultaneous to the university’s exercise of eminent domain at the current People’s Park site in the 1960s, the historically black West Oakland, not even five miles away, was being redlined to make way for new highways. ‘And that memory – no one cares about that – everyone cares about this little threeacre thing [of People’s Park]. Can I use that as a way in my work, and in design, to work through these issues? That is a very selfish thing, but it’s also something of interest at Hood Design – to use projects like this to open a larger dialogue about contested spaces and, ultimately, democratic space.’ Identifying the Frame Like many a youth before Hood, the unencumbered spirit of California attracted him to it. He had spent the previous few years working in landscape and architecture firms in Philadelphia and Washington DC, employing his degree in landscape architecture from North Carolina A&T State University, 90 miles (145 kilometres) up the interstate from his hometown Charlotte. But when applying to architecture graduate school he wanted to escape the East Coast: ‘The East Coast was so confining, in architecture and landscape,’ he says. ‘I needed to discover other ways to think about design.’ In the autumn of 1986 he began his degree at Berkeley. The freedom Hood encountered there drew him in. No one cared what he did. When a professor assigned students to redesign a site, Hood instead devised his own project, plastering the entire review hall with dozens of drawings interrogating his chosen site’s history. He revelled in the idiosyncrasies and diversity of his professors and the community. At Berkeley, ‘it was all of this weird shit that I never thought I’d partake in culturally, but also thrive in’. He added a landscape degree to his course regimen and stuck around another year. After graduating, a professor encouraged him to apply for a teaching job there. He got it, at age 29. ‘The strange thing was I had to then teach in a programme with the people who taught me,’ Hood says. ‘It was terrifying.’

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Hood Design Studio, People’s Park, University of California, Berkeley, due for completion 2024 One of the studio's challenges was to reference the diverse histories of the site, from the housing that had been destroyed by the university in the 1960s to the Ohlone people who once lived on the land for thousands of years prior to European settlement. The design proposes several gardens, one of which is the Origins Garden filled with native plants to honour the site’s indigenous history.

The university has promised to provide housing to anyone living in the park who wants it, and there will be supportive housing on site

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Walter Hood, Courtland Creek, Oakland, California, 1997 Walter Hood planted 150 purple plum trees parallel to the creek in an East Oakland neighbourhood as part of a collaborative restoration project. Through the project, he clarified his design ethos, realising the power of pictorial representation and cultural ideas embedded in the production of landscape.

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Hood planted 150 purple-leaf plum trees in the neighbourhood, dialling in on a right-of-way five blocks from the creek. He credits the project’s success to his having identified the cultural element within environmental design

He emulated these professors as he tried to define his own design tenets. ‘If I didn’t have any sort of convictions, the work would just end up being normalised,’ he explains. He was especially taken by the force of vision articulated by the architects. He struck up a friendship and collaborative relationship with a colleague, photographer Lewis Watts, in the 1990s, in part because their work was motivated by a similar interest in representing Oakland’s black landscape and the Southern traces laced throughout its built environment. Hood was shaped by Watts’s ability to convey character and narrative in their environments, and the simultaneity of portraiture and landscape within his photographs. He could start to see how to define his own ethos. In 1993, he published Blues & Jazz Landscape Improvisations,5 in which human narratives illustrate his designs. Watts contributed photographs to the volume. Hood points to Courtland Creek, a creek restoration project in East Oakland (1997), as the one that crystallised his approach. Ahead of a community meeting, he made nine colourful perspective drawings of the neighbourhood, illuminating specific houses and their identifying features, and a six-foot (1.8-metre) long model. No one had ever made such efforts for them. ‘If I worked in places that were disadvantaged in the same way that I worked in places that were advantaged, people were empowered because they felt like I cared,’ says Hood. ‘And through that caring they then empowered me.’ Hood planted 150 purple-leaf plum trees in the neighbourhood, dialling in on a right-of-way five blocks from the creek. He credits the project’s success to his having identified the cultural element within environmental design, expressed in part through his drawings: ‘Representation allows us to see people differently, because it’s just a representation. It’s not that I don’t care about the environment, but I really have no control over that. I have a lot of control over the picture, and the frame.’

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Hood Design Studio, People’s Park, University of California, Berkeley, due for completion 2024 left: The circuit path propels movement through the site beneath and adjacent to the dormitories, welcoming people through the former site of the historic People’s Park.

left: The brick wall is part of the proposed Commemorative/Advocacy Garden, fostering a space for people and events to remember the protests of the 1960s.

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‘Representation is Everything’ Several high-rise dorms populate the blocks around People’s Park. Hood was determined this new student housing project would not mimic them, particularly the fences that severed them from their surrounding urban fabric. He believed this site, especially given its history as a community gathering point, needed to open to the surrounding neighbourhood. But the design process was coming up short. Hood and Du Solier considered leaving the project, not wanting to be a part of something replicating previous flaws. Stymied, Hood came into his studio one day and constructed a model by hand. It was a way to think differently about the project: ‘I needed a representation, something that – this is going to sound stupid – looked like something. Because the design had got to the point where it was just so normal. It just looked like a landscape.’

left: The proposed landscape surrounding the new dorms includes a slate wall and an asphalt ground that invite people to express themselves, echoing the historic uses of the space. ‘Students need a place for expression, just like people in a neighbourhood need a place for expression,’ says Hood. ‘We need to remember some things, collective things.’ below: The white foam block in Hood’s model represents the dormitory occupying what would be the eastern, uphill edge of the site. ‘Time landscapes’ such as the ‘Psychedelic/1968’ wall and promenade, a Commemorative/ Advocacy Garden and a native Origins Garden all echo the residential lots present before the university razed the site decades ago.

Images of the model show a white foam block representing the dormitory occupying what would be the eastern, uphill edge of the site. A lava-like stepped green blob, depicting a glade, flows out from under the mass, and flat blocks of different colours cascade down the site’s southern edge, portraying various gardens. Their forms echo the residential lots present before the university razed the site decades ago, and comprise what Hood calls ‘time landscapes’. They include a ‘Psychedelic/1968’ wall and promenade, a Commemorative/Advocacy Garden and a native Origins Garden – layers that nod to the site’s past. Hood could now see this project in the same lineage as his other projects, wherein physical elements create a palimpsest of the site’s disparate histories and memories. ‘To me representation is everything,’ he says. ‘When you see it as a model, those lots are strong against that green. That contrast has to be there, it shouldn’t meld together.’ A striking white loop overlays the whole surface, partly obscured as it continues beneath the building. Hood latched onto the idea of the circuit as an organising feature – ‘a walkway that had no beginning and had no end’ and to him a quintessential democratic landscape element – passing through the site’s various landscape spaces and inviting people to move through them. ‘Thinking about how that movement can come through the palimpsest really changed everything for me,’ he says. That change, for Hood, was the power of representation. The model provided a way, or a ‘frame’, to think about the project; it invited a means to understand and portray this site of layered histories, what he calls a ‘hybrid landscape’. He is always searching for the hybridity in a project, particularly in the US, whose history of settler colonialism means sites are multifarious yet ‘encoded and built on these same logics and same stories’. The power of the frame gave Hood agency to see potential in the space: ‘These are three-dimensional spaces that people will see other people in.’ As the designer, it is in his hands to shift how that happens. 1 This article is based on an interview with Walter Hood in Berkeley, California, on 2 June 2022. Notes 1. Erin Blakemore, ‘The Fight for People’s Park’, JSTOR, 15 January 2017: https://daily. jstor.org/fight-peoples-park/. 2. Soumya Karlamangla, ‘The Past and Future of People’s Park’, New York Times, 25 October 2021: www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/us/peoples-park-berkeley.html. 3.Tom Dalzell, ‘From Garden to Fenced-in Lot to Shots Fired in Berkeley: People’s Park on May 15, 1969’, Berkeleyside, 15 May 2019: www.berkeleyside.org/2019/05/15/fromgarden-to-fenced-in-lot-to-shots-fired-in-berkeley-peoples-park-on-may-15-1969; Tom Dalzell, ‘May 30, 1969: The Final Scene in the Powerful First Act of Berkeley’s People’s Park’, Berkeleyside, 30 May 2018: www.berkeleyside.org/2018/05/30/may-30-1969-thefinal-scene-in-the-powerful-first-act-of-berkeleys-peoples-park. 4. Frances Dinkelspiel, ‘The End of the 1960s? Regents Vote to Put Housing in People’s Park’, Berkeleyside, 30 September 2021: www.berkeleyside.org/2021/09/30/studenthousing-berkeley-peoples-park. 5. Walter Hood, Blues & Jazz Landscape Improvisations, Poltroon Press (Berkeley, CA), 1993.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 74–5, 76–7(c), 78–9, 82 © Hood Design Studio; p 77(r) Courtesy of LA Metro (Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority); pp 80–81 © Walter Hood; p 83 © Grace Mitchell Tada

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Neil Spiller

Oyler Wu Collaborative, The Exchange, Columbus, Indiana, 2017

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The pavilion – adjacent to the Irwin Conference Center, formerly the Irwin Union Bank, designed by Eero Saarinen in 1954 – creates a series of spaces of varying degrees of enclosure. It was conceived and built as part of the Exhibit Columbus biannual architecture and design festival. .

A HANDS-ON CONCEPTUAL RIGOUR A MULTI-SCALAR APPROACH

3 Editor Neil Spiller first met Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, founders of the Oyler Wu Collaborative, in 2014. Since then he has been interested in their practice, buildings and teaching, and their application of multi-scalar solutions to projects from jewellery to urban towers, memorials and stairways. Here he talks to them about their recent designs, and the ambience and competitive nature of practising in Los Angeles.

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Good architecture has a conceptual purity and an overarching logic to it. The rigour with which this manifests itself at every scale a building inhabits, from its articulation in response to its urban or rural context, to its door handles, to how it mediates the ground plane, how it touches the sky and a myriad of other details and scales, determines its success as a piece of design. This is very apparent in the work of the Los Angeles practice Oyler Wu Collaborative. When asked about this aspect of their work, Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu (founding partners) respond: ‘With regard to detail, for us what makes a building powerful is not just its initial impact, but rather its ability to keep giving – to be understood in ways that shift, that grow, and that offer something new and exciting as you move from initial impression to fine-grain detail. While we generally believe that big ideas are critical to architectural thinking, those ideas should lend themselves to a wide range of exploration, as each scale of development offers a new way to express that idea.’ So much of their work has moved between radically different scales, and that includes the jewellery work by LACE (Wu’s offshoot design business). ‘Given our interest in inter-scalability, we’ve often taken jewellery concepts from the architectural ideas, and vice versa. Notions of texture, geometric obsessions, and material explorations are all ideas that move relatively fluidly between the architecture and the jewellery.’

Dwayne Oyler, Pages from sketchbook, 2017 Oyler’s sketchbooks are intricate explorations of the characteristic geometries that are distinctive of Oyler Wu’s architectural output.

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LACE by Jenny Wu, Allegro cuff, 2016 LACE, Jenny Wu’s fine jewellery brand, utilises contemporary materials such as carbon fibre as well as the latest 3D-printing technologies to create highly modern rings, necklaces, earrings and bracelets.

LACE by Jenny Wu, Catena necklace, 2014 Like Oyler Wu’s buildings and installations, Wu’s jewellery often consists of intertwined and interlocking elements that come together to form elaborate and original body ornaments.

In the Beginning … Wu and Oyler met as students on the MArch programme at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Prior to that, Wu had received her BA in architecture from Columbia University, while Oyler had obtained his BArch from Kansas State University and collaborated with Lebbeus Woods for three years, working and teaching. During their time at the GSD, they started working on competitions on the side. They were both obsessed with line-based geometries, most evident in Wu’s thesis project and Oyler’s drawings. After their GSD graduation they spent three years in New York, she working for Architecture Research Office and then Gluckman Mayner Architects, and he for Toshiko Mori Architects. They then decided to move to Los Angeles to start their practice and teach at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). LA Connection When asked about the uniqueness of LA in relation to New York, they respond: ‘We think there are different challenges in different cities. Working in New York for several years, we know it is sometimes hard to get ground-up work starting out. We have found LA to be a great starting place for us, from SCI-Arc to an amazing community of

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architects, as well as the great weather. There is also a scale of projects here that are more difficult to find in New York – backyard interventions, installations in parking lots, and ground-up homes, just to name a few. We do know that there is a close-knit community of architects in LA that share our spirit of experimentation and the love of practice.’ There is a vitality in many of the Californian architecture schools and a culture of experimentation that has a much different ambience than many of the well-known schools on the East Coast. Maybe it is down to the vitamin D in sunlight and the clement weather in winter. Oyler and Wu are dedicated teachers who nurture much original and interesting work from their students. They have a deep love of teaching, and fundamentally it grows out of a desire to maintain that similar creative experimentation in future generations of architects. ‘Looking back on our years of teaching, the skills expected of a student have grown exponentially. What hasn’t changed is the incredible energy that students bring to the work and the discussions surrounding it.’ The first 10 years of the practice were focused largely on hands-on installations. That experience fostered a love of making, an obsession with detail and a commitment to exploratory tectonic ideas – a set of interests that remains core to their practice. They have continued to do small, hands-on work, which they feel is key to their way of developing and evolving ideas. The practice now takes on much larger projects too. They are especially interested in the scalability of many of those ideas.

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Oyler Wu Collaborative, 3DS Culinary Lab, Los Angeles, California, 2016 The stripped-back, retrofitted existing interior of the building is modulated and choreographed by the insertion of a highly sculptural staircase.

Oyler Wu Collaborative, Monarch residential tower, Taipei, Taiwan, 2017 The tower is an attempt to erase the elevational monotony that such buildings normally exhibit. This is achieved by articulating the outer envelope to create variations of the balcony geometries, façade shading and fenestration giving each apartment its own individual ambience and aspect.

‘ The lack of conventional separation between the architectural and construction fields has allowed us to use the construction phase as an extension to the design process’ — Oyler Wu Collaborative

Constructing the Deconstructed Impatient to see their ideas put to real effect, the office turned to its own love of building to transform small projects with modest budgets into a testing ground. Los Angeles, SCI-Arc and Taipei have served as invaluable experimental sites for these ambitions. ‘Our work consists largely (although not entirely) of work that we have built ourselves. This way of working originally grew out of necessity, an insistence on detail-driven work on small budgets, and out of the desire to allow the design process to continually respond to feedback provided by the fabrication process. The lack of conventional separation between the architectural and construction fields has allowed us to use the construction phase as an extension to the design process. It has also provided a more direct translation of ideas from digital form to reality, while ensuring a level of articulation often difficult to achieve through a more conventional means of construction. It has been a period of material discovery, invention and experimentation that comes only through the difficult, but profoundly rewarding task of realising the work on a given site.’

Oyler Wu Collaborative with Ren Lai Architects, Re-envisioning of Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, 2020 above: This competition-winning proposal seeks to reintegrate the existing museum into its context utilising a series of visually light hovering canopies that define the entrance and approach to the building.

Oyler Wu Collaborative, Live Wire, SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles, California, 2008 In this installation, the design of staircases with their multi-level spatial opportunities provided an excellent testing ground for the architects to explore their sinuous and sculptural architectural language.

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There have been distinct phases in their practice’s development that have highlighted moments where they have either shifted the scale or the type of work they do. Looking back, they are very proud of the early installations that defined and cultivated the first 10 years of the office. The first high point of those projects would be the Live Wire installation (2008) at the SCI-Arc Gallery, and then the more ambitious project, The Exchange, for Columbus, Indiana (2017). ‘The completion of the Monarch tower in Taipei in 2017 was also a major moment for us as it was our first large-scale ground-up building. Most recently, our winning entries for the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts [2020] and Cold War Veterans Memorial [2022].’ At the time of writing, the office is working on the revitalisation of the LA River at Taylor Yard, a new high-rise in Taipei and a few smaller furniture and residential projects. They hope to continue to work on more significant cultural and institution type projects in the US and abroad. In from the Cold By far the most internationally culturally significant competitionwinning project for Oyler Wu is the Cold War Veterans Memorial within the new Pritzker Archives & Memorial Park Center that is being built in Somers, Wisconsin. The memorial aims to enhance understanding and public appreciation of veterans, both military and civilian, who made great sacrifices during the Cold War – the period from 2 September 1945 to 26 December 1991 when the world settled into a tense standoff between the West and the Soviet bloc in the aftermath of the Second World War, which resulted in the nuclear arms race, space exploration, enhanced military intelligence and much cultural, social and political friction and upheaval in numerous Oyler Wu Collaborative, Orbits – Cold War Veterans Memorial, Somers, Wisconsin, 2022

A competition-winning proposal, integrating the memorial into the landscape and other buildings on the site with its circular geometries.

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The memorial offers a variety of routes through, so visitors can go on their own journey of discovery and remembrance.

Oyler Wu Collaborative’s scheme has a jewellery-like delicacy elevated to building scale and is predicated on overlapping of tilted circular routeways, enclosures and landscapes. It also references and symbolises a range of artefacts from the Cold War. This all adds up to a powerful, all-engrossing and educational experience. Indeed there is nothing more emblematic of Cold War technology and political machinations than the Memorial’s title – Orbits. So the project reconciles two supposed opposites: pure geometric forms which by their articulation also create schisms and splits, facilitating a varied episodic genius loci that continues to intellectually intrigue and entertain the eye but equally projects a solemn sense of commemoration. Of the judging, Colonel Pritzker writes in the press release that accompanied the news: ‘The final decision was tough, but after much discussion, we believe that the Orbits design will truly resemble a place where everyone who contributed to the Cold War will be honored. This memorial is special and very dear to many because people who sacrificed during this era are not recognized enough. Our goal is to make sure that our gratitude to these individuals is signified through this project.’2 So, strangely, it seems appropriate that a California team has won this project. They have deployed their experiments and expertise in multi-scalar spatial and material innovation, techsavvy imagination and optimism to create what will surely be one of the great war memorials, thereby ensuring the evolution of this emotionally taxing building and landscape typology into a new chapter of its long and noble architectural lineage. geographical and political theatres around the world and particularly within its two major protagonists, the Soviet Union and the US. We are still reaping the often devastating effects of it now; there are too many examples to name, and people are still paying a terrible price, with loss of life, loss of their homes and mass migration to escape hardline regimes, religious bigots and the devastations of war. Although it ended over 30 years ago, the Cold War is still too recent for us and historians to fully understand: discussion and debate of its full ramifications remain ongoing, as do its consequences. The introduction to the competition brief for the Memorial, written by Colonel Jennifer N Pritzker (herself a Cold War veteran), says: ‘I want my children and grandchildren, and your children and grandchildren, to have a place where they can contemplate the decisions and actions necessary to create and sustain our democratic freedoms. Our mission to share and preserve the stories of the citizen soldier through honor and education can only be met with the public’s participation. The Cold War Memorial design competition’s goal is to achieve a timeless memorial that will honor Cold War veterans’ service and inspire the public to take the steps necessary to preserve our freedoms for centuries to come.’1

A Creative Milieu Asked what is so special about the Golden State, Oyler Wu replies – summing up the unique creative ambience of California – ‘our hope is, of course, that California will continue to play an essential role in shaping the future of architecture. There is an incredible culture of talented architects of all generations here, and a healthy spirit of camaraderie and competition that comes with that. What has always made California special is the sense of exploration/experimentation combined with an insistence on making/production. This is still a place where ideas flourish in garages, back yards and cramped studios like no other place in the world.’ That’s all Folks! 1 This article is based on an email interview between the author, Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu in June 2022. Notes 1. https://coldwarveteransmemorial.org. 2. Quoted in Dima Stouhi, ‘Oyler Wu Collaborative Selected to Design Cold War Veterans Memorial in Wisconsin’, ArchDaily, 6 April 2022: https://www. archdaily.com/979694/oyler-wu-collaborative-selected-to-design-cold-warveterans-memorial-in-wisconsin.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Oyler Wu

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Courtney Coffman

Princeton University School of Architecture’s Courtney Coffman investigates the architectural and artistic adventures of Ball-Nogues Studio and its very handson approach to material production. The aim of the studio’s work is to engage viewers and encourage them to bring their own perceptions and multiple vantage points to reading it. A mastery of digital and fabrication techniques is therefore crucial to the operation of the studio.

Ball-Nogues Studio, Both Sides of Here, Calexico Port of Entry Border Crossing Station, Calexico, California / Mexicali, Mexico, 2022 Inspired by natural systems, such as heliotropism, the steel structure rises up from the ground, stretching towards the corner – a billboard for the auto-centric scale of the site, yet equally accessible to pedestrians.

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Such a very large body of first-class and highly original architecture cannot be brushed off as an accident, an irrelevance upon the face of an indifferent dystopia. If Los Angeles is one of the world’s leading cities in architecture, then it is because it is a sympathetic ecology for architectural design, and it behoves the world’s architects to find out why. — Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 19711 In his 1971 seminal book, Reyner Banham’s final figure – number 123 – is by artist and LA poster boy Ed Ruscha. It is one of Ruscha’s many silkscreen prints depicting an ombré Hollywood sign perched in isolation atop Mount Lee, backdropped with a gradient of Southern California light. Because all the images throughout Four Ecologies are black and white, Ruscha’s panoramic Hollywood is devoid of any chromatic magic; instead, the regional references of LA’s notorious sunsets are coloured in with Banham’s prose. The most sublime sunsets in LA are an alchemy of potent light and floating particles – the by-product of either the chemical pollutants or

Ed Ruscha, Hollywood, 1968 The iconic and quintessential ‘last look’ in Reyner Banham’s 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies pays homage to the cinematic imageability of LA and its atmospheric sunsets. Ruscha’s technical prowess as a former sign-maker shines among the hazy gradient, suggestive of the city’s auto-induced smoggy air quality.

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the dreadful smoke of burning hillsides or both simultaneously. To experience the ethereal colours of the city is to experience something larger than oneself. If this perspective is too far-out, too transcendental, then consider the microdose scale of these sublime qualities in the tangible designs and public works of Ball-Nogues Studio (BNS). Like most interesting LA-based multivalent practices, BNS defies any singular description: an architecture practice exploring industrial design processes, an art practice operating at the scale of architecture, a research-based practice inventing new tools. Currently led by Benjamin Ball, BNS has retained the experimental spirit associated with Californian creatives since its founding in 2004. Craft is at the core of the studio practice with a specific focus on analogue techniques to execute complex digital geometries. Yet the most impressive part of their process is the design of production and fabrication systems, which demonstrates how closely tethered their imaginative inputs are to the studio’s fantastical outputs. Consideration of a project’s lifecycle has been a part of BNS’s methodology long before it was en vogue – see Yucca Crater (2011), their pool in the high desert shaped from the recycled formwork of the practice's Talus Dome in Edmonton, Alberta (2011) – and post-occupancy considerations are delivered via maintenance schedules and instructions: from routine inspections to bird nests, graffiti, colour preservation and potential ‘tangles’. The physical economics of a given commission are important – consideration of the site, the material accessibility, and installation logistics – but so are the conceptual parameters and iterative experimentation.

Experimental Legacies Reflecting on BNS’s portfolio over the years, there is an inherent aesthetic language that echoes the Light and Space art movement of the late 1960s to the early 1970s in California, where light was emphasised as a material and the art object distilled an ephemeral experience that required the viewer’s perception and participation with the work.2 There’s a highly technological component to this genre – with close ties to the aerospace and aeronautical industries in LA at the time – which is evident in the fetish-finished works of California-based artists such as De Wain Valentine, John McCracken and Larry Bell, or the soft atmospheric colours of Helen Pashgian, Craig Kauffman and Peter Alexander. Similarly, the work of BNS renders the immaterial visible through experiential qualities of materials, with strong consideration of the viewer’s encounter beholding a given work from multiple vantage points. And the technical virtuosity now includes the complex geometries of computational design in architecture – the kind that matriculated from subversive LA ‘institutions’ during the late 1990s and early 2000s, like the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) or Frank Gehry’s studio, both of which are line items on Ball’s CV. Despite this rich disciplinary genealogy, the creative interests at BNS are in the opportunities and challenges materials and process provide; it is not that lineage is of no value or importance here, it is just that there are other places ripe with conceptual fodder for interrogating craft. This artistic spirit spills over into BNS’s methodology, too – experimentation and material exploration take priority over precedent, though Ball is fully aware of such histories, especially the contextual references that are palpable in LA. BNS has carved out a space in California and beyond for public art and installation projects; their works can be seen in airport terminals, universities and civic parks, to name a few. Located off Olympic Boulevard in LA’s Boyle Heights neighbourhood, the BNS studio entry opens into a sizable open warehouse; a small office on the second floor – where the

computer magic tends to happen – overlooks the production floor below and a large rolling door at the back pulls fresh air into the industrial space littered with machines and fabrication components alike. The production space of BNS intentionally operates more like an artist’s studio with machinist tendencies than the typical pragmatic architectural office. Learning Through Materials Perhaps one of the most interesting things about BNS is that they keep as much of their fabrication process in house as possible. This may seem an obvious observation for many small practices to keep low overheads, but consider the knowledge passing through the studio as various collaborators (artists, architects, students and designinterested individuals) receive tangible lessons in fabrication – both digital and analogue – sometimes for the first time. It could be said that every BNS project is ‘value engineered’ in so much that the practice taps into its own inventory of techniques and material explorations; it is quite possible that a recent commission is actually a reprise of a 10-yearold experimentation, and this is celebrated as each iteration presents new learning opportunities. Through each project, BNS perpetually interrogates authorship and the distinction between the hand and the machine. Their prototype, INSTA-LLATOR 1 with the Variable Information Atomizing Module (2009), was developed in tandem with their early ‘Suspension’ projects of stainless-steel ball-chain (the kind that military dog tags hang on). Working with custom software produced by Sparce Studio, the machine was programmed to read the colour and length of a given chain based on their assigned coded geometry in the digital model. The process prompted such questions as ‘Rather than just design with an off-the-shelf CNC device in mind, what does it mean to design your own CNC device … your own robot? How do we escape the limits imposed by commercially available software and fabrication methods? How can tooling be an avenue to design?’

Ball-Nogues Studio, INSTA-LLATOR 1 with the Variable Information Atomizing Module, 2009

Early prototype for fabricating stainless-steel ball-chain with enamel paint coating. Used in the production process of the studio’s early ‘Suspension’ projects, a computer script by Sparce Studio deciphered complex geometries into individual strands of colourcoded measurements; this machine process has since evolved and become even more streamlined with each iteration.

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Ball-Nogues Studio, Weaver’s Knot: Sheet Bend, Philadelphia, 2022 Located in a dynamic site between the Race Street and Cherry Street Piers, next to the Delaware River, viewers behold new perspectives on the city of Philadelphia and themselves within the reflections of the ‘knotted’ structure.

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Both projects maintain shiny stainless-steel reflective surfaces to view new contextual perspectives and emphasise the metaphorical message that we are all tied together

Ball-Nogues Studio, Gordian Knot, Woodbury School of Business, Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah, 2022 The elevation drawing reveals that the undulating canopy hovers just above visitors’ heads, producing multiple vantage points – depending on where and at what time of day the sculpture is viewed.

The Same, But Different Two recent examples include Gordian Knot (2022), a public artwork on the campus of Utah Valley University’s Woodbury School of Business, and Weaver’s Knot: Sheet Bend (2022), located at the Cherry Street Pier along the Delaware River Trail just below the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. At first glance, the projects look nearly identical, yet the differences lie in their subtle intertwining geometries: Gordian Knot maintains three points, whereas Weaver’s Knot: Sheet Bend is two. The former is conceptually tied to the intractable complexity and continuity of its namesake, whereas the latter historically references the parallel practices in historic knotting techniques between the local textile and shipping industries. Both projects maintain shiny stainless-steel reflective surfaces to view new contextual perspectives – whether a campus or a city, singularly or collectively – and emphasise the metaphorical message that we are all tied together.

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Another set of projects that demonstrate this generative approach includes the Healing Pavilion (2016) at CedarsSinai Medical Center in LA and Both Sides of Here (2022), a concept proposal for the Calexico/Mexicali Port of Entry border crossing station. A synthesis in the structural logic of a cage and thin-shell construction, the Healing Pavilion tests the limits of CNC steel bending and rolling techniques. Coated in ceramic alumina, its finish controls the pavilion’s structural integrity and is achieved by thermal flame spraying, which melts the material then atomises with the air – a technique used on aircraft carriers for the non-skid tarmac. Emphasising the importance of each individual line in the parametric form, the pliability of each tube is distinctive in its three-dimensional curvature and reinforces a limberness – a humanity – that the institutional architecture itself cannot: the Healing Pavilion is a site of reprieve and hope right outside of the hospital, while Both Sides of Here blossoms from a bunker of bureaucracy. The shadows cast by the tubular structures double down on the notion of temporality and transition in each location, and reinforce how BNS renders the immaterial visible.

Ball-Nogues Studio, Healing Pavilion, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, California, 2017 right: Fabricated and assembled off site, the cage-like shell structure tests the limits of the CNC tool and identifies its capabilities. The resulting pavilion celebrates the fidelity between the parametric model and the geometries of the physical object. below: Space oddity: the transportation of the fabricated pavilion is reminiscent of the 12mile (19-kilometre) journey by the Endeavour spaceship from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to the California Science Center in Exposition Park.

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Singular Positive It is fair to say you know a BNS project when you see it, and one such identifiable example is the array of colour-coated, stainlesssteel ball-chain installations BNS has exhibited across the US and abroad, from France to New Zealand. Grand in gesture, yet hardly offensive, these ‘Suspension’ projects teeter on a psychedelic experience. Like an aurora borealis, these overhead installations envelope space in colour and light, their sinuous forms articulating invisible forces of the imagination. Their material qualities are a fresh take on Light and Space works, a contemporary rendition for the digital age. Upon further examination, their intertwining complexity recalls the simplicity of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí’s catenary tests – the infamous upside-down model-and-mirror testing the limits of vaulting geometries for such projects as the Sagrada Família basilica (begun in the 1880s) and Casa Milà (1912) in Barcelona. Of all the ball-chain projects in BNS’s ‘Suspension’ series, the most fascinating iteration is floating in 444 South Flower, a tower in Downtown LA with a double-height gallery space boasting a handful yet impressive collection of publicly accessible blue-chip artworks, which Ball admits he stumbled upon years prior to the BNS commission. Titled Breath Catcher (2019), the installation’s strong solitary mass converses with land artist Michael Heizer’s variation on Platonic solids below. Cutting through the expansive lobby, the mass ignores the marble-clad column grid, as thousands of wispy chains shoot through the structure, just as a beam of light would. The project does a spectacular job of marrying the Light and Space movement to the Land Art movement, specifically to that of Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) – an earth work consisting of a massive trench stretching over 1,500 feet (457 metres) in the Moapa Valley near Overton, Nevada – prompting an alternative title for BNS’s piece: Singular Positive. The Shimmer Under the ‘About’ tab on the BNS website is a declaration: ‘Essential to each project is the “design” of the production process itself, with the aim of creating environments that enhance sensation, generate spectacle and invite physical engagement.’3 Borrowing from the late writer Joan Didion, whose prose captures the essence and emotion of Southern California’s cultural and geographic atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s, the work of BNS shimmers. In her seminal essay, ‘Why I Write’ (1976), Didion expounds: ‘When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. There used to be an illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia. This cat had a shimmer around it. You could see the molecular structure breaking down at the very edges of the cat: the cat became the background and the background the cat, everything interacting, exchanging ions. People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of objects … Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there.’4 The movement from particle to geologic scale is tangible in a given BNS project – with the part-to-whole construction being one such metaphor – which transcends such sublime qualities through their unique execution. The viewer is prompted to contend with the object and the images it conjures in their mind when experiencing one of their works. Which is why it is so

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Ball-Nogues Studio, Breath Catcher, 444 South Flower Street, Los Angeles, California, 2019 The light mass of BNS’s ‘suspended’ structure pushes back on the grid of the atrium and provides atmosphere to the art collection below, illuminating the space like natural phenomena. The enamel-coated stainless-steel ball-chain reveals the moiré effects possible through seemingly simple gestures of geometry and colour composition.

Ball-Nogues Studio, Pour Me Another, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee, 2019 above: Interior view through the dome’s ‘oculus’ where the handcraft of each pour is visible on the interior surface, forming ridges that read like arches. below: Located on the museum’s front plaza, the classical shape of the dome is in conversation with the neoclassical façade behind, challenging traditional notions of architectural plasticity.

delightful to see their most recent work in tinted urethane foam, a novel material for the studio and still in the early stages of material tinkering. Installed at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Tennessee, Pour Me Another (2019) is a series of technicolour domed structures that are about pushing the limits of control by hand, one 8-ounce (225-gram) cup at a time. By using this hyper-precise, albeit simple method of pouring a cupful of fluffy urethane foam over an engineered dome, the results yield fantastical qualities that evoke the distinct image of California. From the deeply textured exteriors, the vertical pours allow for light to come through the structures – if you ever wanted to inhabit the space of a tie-dye, this is the place. The interior ‘arches’ and oculus of the green-and-red dome rhyme with the neoclassical architecture of the museum plaza on which it sits. The series conjures images of other boldly coloured ‘poured’ artworks, like American sculptor and visual artist Lynda Benglis’s floorworks or Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce’s resin works; Ball admits the visual similarities, but discloses that his methodology maintains control in execution precisely because the studio is still in the beginner phase of its material education. And it is reassuring to hear such a confession – to know that the work is not yet done, that there is still more experimentation ahead, more atomisation and plenty of shimmer. 1

Notes 1. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Penguin Books (Harmondsworth and New York), 1971, p 244. 2. See Robin Lee Clark (ed), Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface, University of California Press (Berkeley, LA and London), 2011, and Peter Plagens’ review of the exhibition ‘Transparency, Reflection, Light, Space’ at the UCLA University Art Gallery, in Artforum, March 1971, pp 68–9: https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/197103/larry-bell-robert-irwin-craigkauffman-and-peter-alexander-70506. 3. https://www.ball-nogues.com/about/. 4. Joan Didion, ‘Why I Write’, New York Times Magazine, 5 December 1976, p 270: https:// www.nytimes.com/1976/12/05/archives/why-i-write-why-i-write.html. Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 92–3, 95–9 Courtesy of Ball-Nogues Studio; p 94 Ed Ruscha. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian. Digital Image © 2022 Museum Associates / LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY; p 100 © Joshua White; p 101 Courtesy Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

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HOUSING THE UNHOUSED LOS ANGELES ARCHITECTS RISE TO THE CHALLENGE

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Frances Anderton Lehrer Architects, Chandler Boulevard Bridge Home Village, North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, 2021

In a bid to alleviate homelessness on the streets of LA, the city initiated a temporary, or ‘bridge’, housing programme. This compound of tiny homes was designed and built in 13 weeks.

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Author Frances Anderton describes the plight of California’s unhoused, which is particularly endemic in Los Angeles. She identifies the causes and documents how some of the state’s most talented architects are helping to mitigate the problem through the creation of high-quality affordable housing and temporary stepping-stone accommodation.

Tepee in a tent encampment, Venice, Los Angeles, California, 2022 right: This encampment sits alongside a Google office. Since the arrival of the tech titan into Venice in 2011, the divide between extreme wealth and poverty has widened in the neighbourhood.

Tent encampment in Venice, Los Angeles, California, 2022 opposite: Bans and periodic sweeps are enacted in some parts of Venice, so the unhoused pitch tents on streets out of sight.

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It is hard to pinpoint exactly when the levels of visible homelessness started to grow but within the last 10 years or so the City of Los Angeles – perceived for so long as the mecca of easy living for the middle class, in a plentiful supply of singlefamily homes – has come to resemble a 21st-century version of the proverbial Tale of Two Cities, with thousands living on the streets and a glaring divide between rich and poor that has become the talk of the world. But into this breach have stepped many talented Los Angeles architects who have exhibited great creativity in the design of temporary and permanent supportive housing for the unhoused. Homelessness is not new to LA. Since city leaders began a booster campaign in the late 19th century it has been a magnet for dreamers; not all of them have made it. At certain periods in the region’s history, the numbers of down-and-outs have ballooned. Following influxes of people during the Depression and then for wartime work during the Second World War, some 150,000 families dwelled in tents, trailers, firetrap hotels and Quonset huts. Now is another period of intense homelessness; in 2022 the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) estimated that more than 40,000 people were living on the streets of the City of Los Angeles and almost 70,000 in LA County.1 Skid Row and Tent Cities For many decades the unhoused had been largely out of sight, concentrated in the Skid Row area near Union Station in downtown LA, which over a century had become the hub of service providers and charities and low-rent single-room occupancy (SRO) apartment buildings. As of writing in early 2022, an astounding number of people live on city streets – under freeways, on sidewalks, in alleys and parks and in the concretised and mostly dry river. Some of the region’s long avenues and boulevards are now lined with tent cities. The unhoused, who range from individuals with severe mental health problems to singles, couples or even families undone by loss of a job and hikes in rent, sleep on or in shelter of varying solidity, from pieces of cardboard under thin coverings to micro-tents to compounds of tents with outdoor seating areas furnished with sofas and dressers and outdoor tables. Or they live in mobile shelters, the better for moving on quickly when the police come to do periodic sweeps: parked recreational vehicles (RVs) or makeshift variants like bike trailers with portable dwellings on the back. Many reasons are offered for the apparent escalation in homelessness in Southern California (and many cities nationwide): the Reagan-era closing of institutions for the mentally ill, the crack epidemic of the 1980s, the influx of veterans from overseas wars with trauma and substance abuse issues, the 2008 recession which plunged millions underwater in their homes, the rise of Airbnb and the disappearance of rental property along with non-existent or weakened rent controls and the growing income disparity between rich and poor. But the numbers are extreme in the city of Los Angeles, which is one of 88 cities in the County of Los Angeles and one of the few to not enforce citywide bans on encampments (a ban deemed unconstitutional in cities lacking adequate shelter for their homeless population) though it tightened its rules in 2022, then in early 2023 the newly elected Mayor Karen Bass declared a State of Emergency on homelessness and launched a programme

to move people from encampments into hotels and motels. So tent cities had been stopping at the invisible borders of municipalities like Beverly Hills or Santa Monica. Another factor is the design of the tent itself: the invention of the modern dome tent is credited by some with enabling the spread of tent living far beyond Skid Row. This small tent, with a rectangular floor and two poles going diagonally through the top, evolved from the Buckminster Fuller-inspired Oval Intention geodesic dome tent invented in California in the 1970s. It is light, easy to set up, relatively inexpensive and, most importantly, freestanding; it does not need to be pegged into the ground, so people can set up ‘home’ on hard sidewalks anywhere. The rampant expansion of tents has produced an urban counter-response. Occupants of homes or stores heighten and strengthen fences and gates to wall out the unhoused or they install ostensibly benign planters on the sidewalk, so there is no room to put up a tent. The greatest cause of homelessness in Los Angeles however is the most obvious: a lack of homes – permanent physical homes at an affordable price. The paradox of LA is that it was created by a real-estate industry whose raison d’être was growth, and yet voters and elected officials have consistently constrained that growth through zoning and other stratagems, with the goal of maintaining the region’s idealised semi-urban form – horizontal, dispersed, low rise, an endless garden city. Planners and policymakers have tried valiantly to change this and in the last few years state laws have been enacted to allow a small rise in density on the single-family lots. In addition, the city gives density bonuses (an increase in permissible dwelling units) to developments close to the newly emerging light rail and subway network; and developers are expected to incorporate some ‘affordable’ housing in new market-rate complexes. None of this provides enough homes for the working poor and the tight reins on development mean that land values soar, sending up costs of homebuilding.

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Stepping Up to the Plate During the periods of extreme homelessness, however, architects and planners have stepped up, producing some of LA’s most innovative housing. In 1938, in the depth of the Depression years, the city created a public housing department, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) and, over the next 15 or so years, created complexes of ‘garden apartments’: hundreds or thousands of units in two-storey structures containing townhouses and flats, arranged around grassy courts. The architecture was utilitarian but the goal was openness, cleanliness and greenery. They were designed by some of LA’s most talented architects – including Robert Alexander, Richard Neutra and Paul R Williams – along with the best landscape architects of the time and they harnessed modernist ideas about healthful living.2 Exemplified in designs like Neutra’s 1943 Channel Heights in San Pedro, these garden apartment complexes synthesised low-rise courtyard living (long popular in LA) with the garden city movement and the efficient, rationalist, mass-produced housing concepts of European modernists. All this was overlaid on residential superblocks (in which multiple blocks of land were aggregated into one ‘superblock’) and separated from the surrounding urban fabric by a ring road. Built into the designs was a communitarian philosophy and the notion that residents should share facilities like meeting rooms, laundries and nurseries. They had pastoral names – Aliso Village, Ramona Gardens, Rose Hill Courts, Pueblo Del Rio, Jordan Downs, Hacienda Village, Channel Heights – and they represented a moment of high idealism in design and social activism. Unfortunately the publicly funded garden apartments were a short-lived experiment and came to an end in the mid-1950s amidst the Red Scare (a fear of the rise of communism) and voter discontent with spending tax dollars on providing housing for the poor and people of colour. Once-decent complexes were ill-maintained and poverty became concentrated, giving rise to the social challenges that have beset housing ‘projects’ the world over. Neutra’s Channel Heights fell into disrepair and has mostly gone. Currently some of the complexes are being given massive overhauls, and their garden courts are being replaced with new apartments and townhouses in New Urbanist configurations and Spanish-inflected styles. In the absence of a large-scale public housing programme in recent decades, into the void has stepped a new kind of housing provider in Los Angeles: nonprofit developers of ‘affordable’, or deed-restricted, housing, financed through tax credits and subsidised to reach people earning between 30 and 60 per cent of the local median wage. Some focus mostly on dwellings for working families. Some emphasise homes for veterans or for the elderly or for people with mental health struggles. Others, such as Skid Row Housing Trust (SRHT), cater to the unhoused in downtown Los Angeles – and beyond, because urban renewal in downtown has sapped the supply of SROs. SRHT and several other nonprofit developers have tapped some of LA’s best design talent to create housing with wraparound rehabilitation and support services in distinctive buildings centred on social spaces like courts and shared amenities. It is in these designs that you find some of the greatest innovation in contemporary LA architecture.

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Michael Maltzan, for example, designer of the new Sixth Street Viaduct (2022), garnered attention for the 2009 New Carver apartments for SRHT, a dramatic circular structure in stark white, sited right by the 10 Freeway. He followed that with Star Apartments, completed in 2013, in the heart of Skid Row, which was designed to test a modular construction system. There, 102 dwellings, a community clinic and shared amenities are arranged in prefabricated blocks in a kind of reverse pyramid structure over an existing building with a shared roof garden on one of its terraces.

Michael Maltzan, Star Apartments, Los Angeles, California, 2013 This 102-unit building for Skid Row Housing Trust provides homes and supportive services in the heart of Skid Row in downtown LA. Maltzan also tested an experimental structure of prefabricated modules laid atop an existing building.

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Patrick Tighe and John V Mutlow, Courtyard at La Brea, Los Angeles, California, 2014 Because it has been so hard to build affordable housing in residential neighbourhoods, nonprofit developers like West Hollywood Community Housing Corporation have built on arterial streets like the six-lane La Brea Avenue. Concealed from view is a courtyard for the residents.

These buildings typically do not sit in quiet tree-lined neighbourhoods; they are parked on arterial roads and near freeways and designers have to be ingenious about creating a sense of home in such locations

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Brooks + Scarpa, Rose Apartments, Venice, Los Angeles, California, 2022 above: Venice Community Housing Corporation developed this complex of 35 studio and onebedroom apartments for young people moving from foster care into adult life. Terraced seating and two courtyards offer a dramatic view onto the Santa Monica Mountains, while the building is a bold presence on the street.

Brooks + Scarpa, The Six, Westlake, Los Angeles, California, 2016 opposite: At The Six, the architects put 52 apartments and studios in a U-shaped block over services, creating a raised courtyard for its residents – formerly homeless individuals including many veterans. The name comes from the military’s phrase ‘got your six’, meaning ‘I’ve got your back’.

These buildings typically do not sit in quiet tree-lined neighbourhoods; they are parked on arterial roads and near freeways and designers have to be ingenious about creating a sense of home in such locations. At the Courtyard at La Brea, built in 2014 by West Hollywood Community Housing Corporation for formerly homeless LGBTQ youth and people living with disabilities and HIV/AIDS, the architects Patrick Tighe and John V Mutlow turned the 32 petite dwellings inwards, looking onto an inner court, then wrapped the outside in swirling metal ribbons, made by the digital fabricator Andreas Froech, for the delectation of drivers on the six-lane boulevard. Brooks + Scarpa, who won the American Institute of Architecture’s (AIA’s) 2022 Gold Medal in part for their extensive work in low-income housing, built The Six in 2016 for Skid Row Housing Trust. It is notable for its bold form, like a giant cube with a huge hole cut away to reveal a courtyard space that is raised over support services, providing shared space that is also protected from the street. In 2022 they completed the mixed-use Rose Apartments, arranged in a similar configuration with glitter stucco on its three wings around open-air terraces that have views all the way to the Santa Monica Mountains. Its owner, Venice Community Housing, put their own offices in the ground level. It is one of the most striking buildings in the neighbourhood.

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These affordable buildings – custom designed and subject to all manner of regulations and costs – do not come cheap however. So developers are trying to scale up in size to reduce unit cost

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The shared open spaces, in the form of courts as well as outdoor stairways, bridges and roof terraces, are incorporated for two reasons: to reduce energy costs through cross-ventilation and to provide social encounters for people who have sometimes spent many years on the streets. Lorcan O’Herlihy, on the map for several striking multi-family buildings, designed MLK1101 (2018), 26 units of supportive housing for formerly homeless families and military veterans for a nonprofit developer called Holos Communities, formerly Clifford Beers Housing. Sited by a wide, highly trafficked boulevard, it consists of an L-shaped building around an elevated plaza for the residents. Tenants gather for Thanksgivings and other events on the shared plaza. Scaling Up These affordable buildings – custom designed and subject to all manner of regulations and costs – do not come cheap however. So developers are trying to scale up in size to reduce unit cost. Some are pushing simply for more reuse of existing buildings that have outlived their usefulness, like office buildings following the pandemic that sent millions of people to work at home. An increasingly popular solution to the affordability problem is to build with prefabricated modular units to streamline the process, get much of the construction done in a factory and deliver pre-approved units to the site. You see this being tested in permanent housing and also in temporary ‘Bridge’ shelters, as modelled most vividly in the 2021 Chandler Boulevard Bridge Home Village, a compound of 39 one- or two-person tiny homes in gabled structures sitting in a V-shaped sliver of land between a road and a busway in North Hollywood. The off-the-shelf dwellings were fabricated by a Northern California company named Pallet Shelter, and configured into a colourful compound by Lehrer Architects, complete with umbrellas and tables on a ground plane in a splashy red, orange, blue and green pattern. As with the aforementioned projects, this housing for those recently living on the streets has become a canvas for the architectural imagination and hopefully a source of sanctuary for its residents. 1

Notes 1. ‘LAHSA Releases 2022 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count Results’, 8 September 2022: www.lahsa.org/news?article=895-lahsa-releases-2022-great-los-angeleshomeless-count-results-released. 2. See Frances Anderton, Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles, Angel City Press (Los Angeles), 2022.

Lorcan O’Herlihy (LOHA), MLK1101, South Los Angeles, California, 2018 LOHA configured the 26 units into an L shape allowing for cross-ventilation and light into the apartments as well as access for all tenants to outdoor stair- and walkways, a shared plaza and social spaces, raised over parking and streetlevel services.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 102–3 Lehrer Architects LA; pp 104–5 © Frances Anderton; p 107 © Gabor Ekecs; p 108(t) © Art Gray Photo; p 108(b) Courtesy of Brooks + Scarpa and Tara Wujcik; p 109 Courtesy of Brooks + Scarpa and Jeff Durkin; p 110–11 Photo by Here And Now Agency

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Eva Menuhin

Architect Alexis Rochas, founder of Stereobot, has a history of producing spectacular light shows and urban interventions using space-frame technology. Art and architecture writer Eva Menuhin records the firm’s creative trajectory and further explores their recent developments, using the same techniques, that can provide homes for those hit by disaster, whether financial or physical, or both. 112

Stereobot, 360° Silent Disco, Coachella Festival, Indio, California, 2022 above: Stereobot’s space-frame structures derive from a system Alexis Rochas developed while teaching at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles. They are constructed from interlocking aluminium struts in a geometric pattern, with steel nodes at the intersections that are able to accept struts of almost any length and angle. opposite: The structural frames of Stereobot’s largescale installations are designed using parametrics, then covered with custom-designed stretch fabric ‘skins’ and illuminated from within using interactive lighting systems.

Changes in technology, ideas of sustainability, notions of architectural versatility and the transience of structures have instigated a reappraisal of the premises upon which architects have long relied, and the evolution of the digital and its penetration into all aspects of the architectural arts has rearticulated the relationship between the architect, client and contractor. Forward-looking designers can now harness processes such as 3D digital fabrication and robot technology to realise designs that previously had to remain purely speculative, and can maintain a greater control of the translation process that goes from the design to fabrication. The Los Angeles-based company Stereobot occupies the nexus of these interrelated preoccupations and developments. It was founded in 2012 by visionary architect Alexis Rochas, who creates temporary structures that integrate design, space-frame technology and advanced fabrication techniques by using robotic cutting and computers to design the complicated, customdesigned forms that marry ‘structure’ and ‘skin’.

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Weaving a Fata Morgana Temporary or mobile architecture has existed for thousands of years, wherever humans moved their homes from place to place according to their needs: yurts in central Asia’s steppes, tipis in the Great Plains and prairies of North America, Bedouin tents in the desert regions of the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. And the temporary theatres of ancient Rome, mobile opera troupes of medieval Europe and travelling carnivals of 19th-century rural North America were transient realms that captured the imagination, promising escape from the mundane world into realms of the amazing and unexpected where anything could happen. Stereobot’s Lightweaver is what Rochas calls ‘mirage architecture’, an ephemeral space around which people can anchor compelling experiences before it disappears, leaving only memories. Designed by Rochas for the 2014 Coachella music festival, the looping, double compound-curved kinetic sculpture towered over the festival grounds, its skin a living canvas for a mesmerising series of ever-shifting light effects and sound scores. The project’s goal had been to design a magical, spectacular gathering space to provide an experience where art would be shaped by play, dissolving the boundary between performance and audience. However, Rochas and his team would have to develop new construction and design techniques to realise the beautiful, interactive fusion of complex architecture and engineering, physical computing, dynamic lighting and music they had in mind. Moreover, although construction efficiency is seldom addressed during discussions about conceptual ways of making space, a previous art installation designed by Rochas for Coachella 2012 had already demonstrated the utility of giving a project’s logistical and formal values equal importance during the design phase. Designers are given access to Coachella only 10 days before the festival kicks off, and Rochas had to design a complex structure without a foundation that could nevertheless withstand high desert winds, be set up rapidly and come down again in 24 hours. The Choreography of Construction Lightweaver and Stereobot’s other sculptures are spaceframe systems. These are based upon the inherent geometric stability of a triangle; that is, even if a triangle’s angles were hinged, it could not change its shape without changing the length of one or more of its sides. This inherent rigidity is also true of three-dimensional tetrahedrons, which become stronger as they are linked together in a network to create a space-frame system. Mass is exchanged for geometry to achieve strength, making it possible to span long distances and create inherently structural designs based on minimal use of material. Space-frame systems have been used in aircraft design, bridges and buildings since the early 20th century because they are light yet strong. But fabrication

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Alexis Rochas, Bruce Danziger (ARUP engineering) and lighting design Bryant Place (Obscura Digital), Lightweaver, Coachella Festival, Indio, California, 2014 Lightweaver’s shape, 45 feet (14 metres) tall and 75 feet (23 metres) wide, is an example of how complexity can be articulated and integrated. The interactive art installation used projection mapping to trace the contours of the sculpture, blurring the distinction between real and virtual 3D space.

methods limited the variety of forms that could be executed economically or, indeed, at all. Large-scale, freeform designs such as Lightweaver would have introduced an unfeasibly high level of complexity into the structural design and fabrication process of a space-frame system because there are few, if any, uniform elements. The new technology Rochas developed for Lightweaver uses robotic programming to streamline the technical aspects of fabricating complex space-frame structures. The structural elements are aluminium tubes of varying length which connect into heavy 3D-printed steel nodes. Each tube is precisely shaped and indexed using 3D laser cutting, and each node has a unique arrangement of holes, drilled robotically in a predetermined geometry. The tubes and nodes are joined according to absolutely precise specifications, making it possible to swiftly and economically construct even Lightweaver’s complex framework and cover it with custom-designed fabric. Transient Cradles for Alternative Visions In February 2015, the city of Santa Monica, California, commissioned Stereobot to create a custom-designed new stage for the city’s Twilight Concert Series, held every summer on the Santa Monica Pier. The 36-foot (11-metre) high Twilight Concert stage was finished in July, well in time for that year’s events. The open structure is constructed on the same principles as Lightweaver – tensile fabric stretched over a space frame – and is a work of art in itself rather than a mere backdrop or conventional stage with hidden working parts. Its cantilevered spans cup the stage on three sides without obscuring views of the musicians, the sunset sky, and the brightly lit amusement park on the Pier. The fabric skin is illuminated internally, strobing and dimming and changing colours and patterns in sync with the music.

Stereobot, Twilight Concert Stage, Santa Monica Pier, California, 2016 When designing the Twilight Concert Stage, it was decided to take advantage of the unique location to develop a full threedimensional experience that would be as engaging to admire and interact with during the day as at night when in use as a concert venue.

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The 360° Silent Disco pavilion designed for Coachella in 2022 was an iteration of Stereobot’s 3D stage concept, this time in the full round. The hexagonal pavilion resembled a giant, glowing skeletal sea urchin at the heart of the city of tent structures, enclosing an evanescent volume within which festivalgoers could feel they were participants in a transcendent, other-worldly piece of performance art. The success of Lightweaver and the other large-scale event projects Stereobot has built over the last decade is an example of how valuable transient structures can be as a way of examining speculative projects, showcasing new technologies and proposing alternative visions for the built environment. Their ephemerality frees them from the stricture of permanence that defines conventional architecture, although rule-breaking, innovative structures intended to be temporary often do become permanent. The Eiffel Tower in Paris, designed by the engineer Gustave Eiffel as the entrance arch for the 1889 World’s Fair, is a famous example. Transient architecture is also a useful way of testing the validity of strategies for urban renewal, and Stereobot frequently works with cities and communities to transform neglected urban areas into interactive spaces for public gatherings and community interaction. ‘LuminoCity’ was a large-scale, multi-site urban art ‘activation’ created by Stereobot for Detroit, Michigan, in 2017. The network of 16 illuminated, interactive installations of varying sizes connected over 200 public spaces, buildings, parks and cultural institutions in the city’s central business district. Part of the team’s brief was to get people out of their cars and walking, especially during the cold, dark winter months, so the installations were within a short strolling distance of each other, glowing beacons enticing pedestrians further along a trail of light. The year before, in 2016, Stereobot had created the Loop for Long Beach, California. The Downtown Long Beach Alliance wanted to create a temporary public gathering space on an empty, neglected 7,700-squarefoot (715-square-metre) site between the downtown area, the convention centre and the waterfront. The brightly coloured, undulating Loop, animated by sound and light choreographies, snaked around the entire site, forming arches under which people could access the central oasis garden and gathering places.

Stereobot, The Loop, Long Beach, California, 2016 The Loop was an urban oasis, commissioned to reinvigorate a dormant site in the heart of the Long Beach business district. It hosted art and cultural happenings, and weekly and seasonal events that included dance, music performances and yoga sessions. Light and sound choreographies created a vibrant atmosphere at night, to extend the use of the small park beyond sunset.

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Stereobot, Gateway, ‘LuminoCity’, Detroit, Michigan, 2017 The Gateway was the central focus point for the multisite art installation. The 35-foot (11.5-metre) tall, 70-foot (21-metre) wide multiple arch combined 3D video mapping and augmented lighting to transform itself into a 14-hour loop of content from US video artists.

A California Dream Latterly, however, Rochas has shifted his primary goal from creating large-scale event structures to addressing more fundamental and important issues. His ‘California Dream’ is about building technology and how it might advance the power of design to overcome our hardest societal challenges. Rochas believes that better tools for spatial design have a massive transformative power to improve the way we live, and to that end the adaptive space-frame technology developed for Lightweaver – the universally adaptable construction methodology he only half-jokingly calls ‘an architectural panacea’ – has been at the centre of Stereobot’s research ever since. In 2017 Stereobot worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in providing disaster relief assistance for Puerto Rico, where 15,000 families lost their homes to Hurricane Maria. Within two weeks of the storm, the team had designed, engineered and fabricated a demonstration project in the city of San Juan.

Stereobot, FEMA disaster relief house prototype, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2017 The Category 5 (150+ mph; 254 km/h) wind-resistant structural system for fast-track housing was delivered and assembled on site in a single eight-hour day. It included a foundation system of helical anchors, a raised foundation slab, and end support walls and roof.

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A priori, the Stereobot team could not define what their mission would be; every disaster is different, as are the means to relieving its effects. They discovered that priorities had to be redefined on a daily basis, and began by thinking of a temporary shelter, then realised that the lightweight space-frame system designed for installation art lent itself perfectly to the design of permanent housing. The freeform character of the system meant that during the design stage it could be adapted to varying requirements and Puerto Rico’s uneven terrain. The preformed space frames and structural nodes made rapid self-assembly by unskilled labour possible, and the size of the units could be adapted to accommodate complex family structures. The entire frame of the 500-square-foot (46.5-square-metre) house could fit into a space measuring 3 x 3 x 6 feet (1 x 1 x 2 metres) and weighed only 500 pounds (227 kilograms) – it could be transported in the cargo bed of a pickup truck, and was. It was a quantum improvement on existing modular, prefabricated building design. The project was very meaningful for the team, because it allowed them to understand and validate the potential of their approach to addressing the key issues that affect home building: affordability, speed of execution and environmental awareness. On a personal level, Rochas calls it a life-changing experience which has continued to inspire him to make better home-building a ubiquitous reality. The lessons learned during the Puerto Rico project were seminal for Rochas and Stereobot. In 2017, California passed legislation to promote accessory dwelling units (ADUs) – secondary housing units on a single-family residential lot – to increase the state’s number and affordability of housing units. By 2018 Stereobot had developed a rapid, cost-effective system for building ADUs ranging from 400-square-foot (37-square-metre) studios to 1,200-square-foot (110-square-metre) homes, and in 2020 Rochas launched Oasys, an offshoot of Stereobot. The company designs and fabricates customisable, affordable ADUs and homes of up to 4,000 square feet (370 square metres), with a minimal environmental footprint and rapid construction times, all over California. In Malibu, where people are also using ADUs as temporary housing after the 2018 wildfire known as the Woolsey Fire, Oasys delivered their first temporary housing unit in 2020 to a client that wanted – quite reasonably – a non-flammable house. The entire project took a month from design to construction and the steel-clad structure can eventually be disassembled and moved. During the same time period, the team proactively addressed the need for emergency homeless shelters, fasttrack housing solutions and provision of Temporary Covid-19 Overflow facilities.

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Oasys, Accessory dwelling unit (ADU) prototype for Los Angeles Design Festival, Los Angeles, California, 2020 Oasys, an offshoot of Stereobot, designs permanent space-frame structures using the technology and methodology invented for Stereobot’s temporary art installations. By combining off-site manufacturing with rapid on-site assembly, this prototype was built in five days.

Oasys, ADU, Topanga, California, 2021

Oasys, HUB Structural Node, Los Angeles, California, 2022

The space-frame technology Oasys uses accommodates many terrains, scales and materials and allows for highly personalised designs. The company has completed the design of over 100 ADUs and houses to date and is working on construction projects across California.

The one-piece Oasys space-frame node is 3D-printed in metal, and joins multiple framing members that come together from many different angles at one common work point. Each node is uniquely designed and fabricated to connect the frame members for each specific location within each space frame. Oasys has developed a metal 3D-printed spaceframe toolset that is being made open to designers and builders alike.

Designers have the ability to understand what changes in our lives will demand major adjustments in the way we behave and interact, and to contribute concepts and objects that will make it easier for us to cope Designing for an Unstable World Worldwide, people are experiencing dramatic alterations in the most basic dimensions of human existence: climate, space, time, privacy, health – shifts in society, technology, culture. Everything is changing and changeable. The modern world is throwing up challenges which cannot be anticipated but which nevertheless must be met quickly. Stereobot’s work is the antithesis of mannered artistry, where the architect is god and architecture has no context. That might be because they are based in Los Angeles – the most protean of US cities, a megalopolis with no defined centre that exists in semi-desert at the grinding edges of two tectonic plates, subject to earthquakes, floods, wildfires and landslides. It embodies the instability and insecurity of our postmodern society, where conditions can change within weeks or, in the case of natural disaster, conflict or even legislation, within hours. More than almost any other profession, designers have the ability to understand what changes in our lives will demand major adjustments in the way we behave and interact, and to contribute concepts and objects that will make it easier for us to cope. Rochas and his team understand that architecture has consequences, and that the most fundamental responsibility of architecture and design today is to help people deal with the displacement and change that now defines their lives while, perhaps, creating a bit of magic in the process. 1 Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 112 © Oasys Building Technology, photo Jacob Zindrosky; pp 113, 116–17, 118(t), 118–19(b) © Joshua White; pp 114–15 © Stereobot, photos Eiko Tsuchiya; p 119(t) © Oasys Building Technology

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Jasmine Benyamin

Atelier Manferdini, Dahlia, ‘When You Touch About Me, I Think Myself’ exhibition, SIGNS Istanbul, Turkey, 2020 The theatrical promise of architectural installations is explored through the deployment of the latest mixed-reality advancements. The use of tablets and phones activates the otherwise still images.

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Colour has again exploded on the architectural scene, nowhere more markedly than in California. Jasmine Benyamin, a lecturer at the University of Southern California School of Architecture, examines the chromatically ambitious designs of Atelier Manferdini, whose visually saturated projects enliven building interiors and urban streetscapes alike. Not since the halcyon days of postmodernism have we witnessed such exuberant panoramas.

Atelier Manferdini, Folds and Pleats I II III, ‘Ink on Mirror’ exhibition, Industry Gallery, Los Angeles, California, 2016 An iteration of Atelier Manferdini’s ‘Building Portraits’ series printed on reflected surfaces, this triptych of drawings defies any stable definitions associated with ‘section’ or ‘elevation’ and rather transforms with viewer interaction.

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God gave us the sun and the ocean, but the colours came mostly from the fumes and pollution. — Reyner Banham, 19721 As the sun sets in his televised homage to the City of Angels entitled ‘Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles’, the British historian waxes poetic about a place that breaks all the rules, a place that he loves ‘with a passion that goes beyond sense or reason’.2 Indeed, from the perspective of his institutional upbringing, the urban sprawl upends most conventions of town planning. And yet, it works. Ending his alternative motor-driven grand tour as the ‘plastic fluorescent spectacle’3 bids adieu, Banham evokes a sense of wonderment that has attracted visitors and émigrés since the city’s inception. Italian-born Elena Manferdini also loves Los Angeles. So much so that she wrote an essay bearing Banham’s phrase in its title. Echoing his sentiments, her first take on her adopted home notes the ‘whiter sunlight’ basking

over the blue kidney-shaped swimming pools dotting the landscape.4 One thinks of English artist David Hockney’s light-drenched paintings (such as his famous 1967 acrylic A Bigger Splash), of American photographer Slim Aarons’s Poolside Gossip (1970 – see pp 6–7) but also of filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson’s meandering Covina romp in Boogie Nights (1997). Cinematic qualities abound; as Scottish artist David Batchelor has elsewhere noted, when the angel in German director Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987) falls to earth, he falls for colour; he falls for love; he falls for life. To be in colour is to be human.5 So what is the architectural promise of the Golden State where the sun purportedly always shines? Arguably, one of Manferdini’s more emphatic replies would be ‘colour!’. Across all scales, from ground-up housing projects to the lush surfaces of her bespoke rugs, colour is at the forefront of all her creative output. Her multidisciplinary training – her Italian upbringing as an engineer but also her student years at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),

and her early work in architect Greg Lynn’s office – exposed her to practices where computation was a nascent tool that frontloaded the design process. Fast forward a few decades and her current work assumes digital platforms as operative tools rather than ends in themselves. Her virtuosity for new technologies is matched by the sense of play and pleasure that imbues the work. Serving first and foremost as cultural indexes, colours for Manferdini are products of her light-strewn working environment: ‘colour is a very powerful tool for architects, perhaps the most powerful tool in the box. Colour is on steroids, it’s everywhere … and I think that colours carry ideas about our society that are worth exploring.’6 She goes even further to extoll the democratising power of a particular kind of chromatic thinking – algorithmically produced and reified through social media – to reflect a contemporary vision that invites users to imagine other worlds for themselves. In the digital realm, colour is coded, scripted and re-presented.

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Colour Against the Canon Initially conceived as a suite of drawings produced for the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015 (and reprised in 2016 in Los Angeles for the Industry Gallery), the ‘Building Portraits’ series are scripted line drawings that, not accidentally, derive their content as much from her polytechnic background as they do from Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago façades. Manferdini knows her masters – Renaissance and Modernist alike. In fact, her formal language falls largely in line with her Latinate and Bauhaus predecessors, but in her nimble hands and vivid imagination they instigate new formal inquiries with the crucial addition of pigmented preoccupations. These and others in the broader series (‘Shapes and Ground’, ‘Postures and Ground’ etc) challenge the assumption that orthographic projections require a certain degree of abstraction to succeed as representational tools. These are not examples of the ‘real’ undergoing a second-order flattening. Rather they challenge the parameters of both the documentary and speculative realms of drawing; they are generative, data driven, historical and future-thinking. The thicket of layers that constitutes Manferdini’s drawings carries data that is colour coded. New tools rely on our previously held associations with certain hues. Colour then runs through its computational paces and is off to the races. The output can be best described as next-generation digital collage that mobilises colour as both embedded and embodied information. The shift from negative to pixel-based imagery allows for seamless scaling.

Atelier Manferdini, Kaida Centre of Science and Design, Dongguan, China, 2019 Illustrative of Atelier Manferdini’s ‘Living Picture’ concept, the project treats viewers as active participants in a transformative play of colour.

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The Destruction of the Wall (and Floor) In his postwar essay entitled ‘Modern Architecture and Colour’, French painter Fernand Léger notes: ‘a blank wall is a dead, anonymous surface … A coloured wall becomes a living element. This transformation of the “Wall” through colour will become one of the most exciting problems of the new architecture.’7 While Léger could not have predicted what would become of the wall in the hands of 21st-century practitioners, he would surely admire their polychromatic enthusiasm. An artist who was apprenticed in an architecture firm, Léger saw the wall as part of a ‘three-way understanding’ between it, the architect and the painter. ‘How can we create a feeling of space, a pushing back of limits? Simply with colour, by walls of different colours … Colour is a powerful means of action, it can destroy a wall, it can embellish it, it can push it back or bring it forward, it creates a new space.’8 Enter the installation for the Kaida Centre of Science and Design in Dongguan (2019), a project described by Manferdini as an ‘art wall’ that ‘transforms the connective corridor into an immersive environment for viewers to get lost in’.9 Comprising both still and moving elements, the project is not meant to be viewed from a fixed position; rather it asks passers-by to engage in an act of touchingwhile-looking. As such, no one meaning can be ascribed to it, and this is a key feature of many of Manferdini’s projects. The grid of rotating blocks offers a multiplicity of chromatic configurations. Shifting saturations and hues reflect a subjective rather than universal interest in colour’s properties.

Atelier Manferdini, Still Life with Flowers; Cedro rug design for Erik Lindstrom’s Botanical Collection, Los Angeles, California, 2021 Thinking colour through textile explorations is an ongoing focus of Manferdini’s creative output, which includes fashion and design objects.

This interest tackles another register with the Dahlia installation – Atelier Manferdini’s contribution to a group exhibition on view in Istanbul in 2020. A wall of intricately modelled digital ‘flowers’ forms the backdrop to an augmented-reality triptych of close-up views. This wallscale intervention treats viewers as not merely spectators, but co-authors of their personal work of art. By holding up tablets or their smartphones to any of the squares, users transform the digital canvases into interactive animate worlds. Here, colour is pure light – its digital foundations enable full-spectrum RGB. Gone are the days of materialassigned colour. Black and white bookend a range of values from zero to all. If there was ever a doubt that colour was in the subjective eye of the beholder, Dahlia quickly dispels it. These embedded surfaces take on a more tufted third dimension with Atelier Manferdini’s rugs. If one were to think of the ‘Building Portraits’ as scripted and colour-coded fields, the leap to textiles is a natural one. Manferdini’s foray into hand weaving began in 2018 with her commission for Shanghai-based Urban Fabric. The earlier iteration more closely indexed the dense geometric layering of her ‘Building Portraits’, while this more recent project takes on the genealogy of still lifes to challenge both the avant la lettre photorealism of the Dutch Golden Age and the broken picture planes of French painter Paul Cézanne’s apples. Still Life With Flowers; Cedro, Still Life With Leaves; Monstera and Still Life With Panicles; Heliconia (all 2021) comprise a suite of three digitally derived nature morte. Whereas in the 2018 series the layering of colour aimed to highlight the complexities of the cities in which they were based, the Still Life rugs capture nature via fabrication techniques that harness the same technologies used in her drawings. As in Dahlia, the ‘still’ in still life is subverted by a sense of movement magnified only through one’s experience of it – sitting, standing, walking and lying each offer unique engagements with the compositions.

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Forays into Full-Scale Programming Manferdini’s architecture commissions offer her yet another avenue of chromatic experimentation. If the drawings blurred the lines between speculation and representation to offer a vision of spaces and objects yet to come, in-situ permanent insertions, like most buildings, share a fundamental trait: they do not move. So could colour in this context be a vehicle to explore Manferdini’s perception games? The painted façade of the Mei Mei Lou (2018) – a mixed-use building in Los Angeles combining retail on the ground floor and live-work spaces above – mimics patterns of black-and-white subway tiles to create optical illusions. Other colours, namely blue, yellow and ‘millennial pink’ yield unexpected readings. Do these chromatic patterns rest at the level of ornament, or do they do more heavy lifting? It would be difficult to argue that the colour scheme is subordinate in any way to any pre-ordained form. Her two most recent projects, Color by Number and inVISIBLE (both 2023), illustrate the latest iteration of Manferdini’s chromophilia, whereby the formal proposal and façade composition develop in tandem. Atelier Manferdini, Color by Number, West Hollywood, California, 2023 right: A façade design developed in conjunction with new housing, the floor plans for the individual units were also designed by Atelier Manferdini.

Atelier Manferdini, Mei Mei Lou renovation, Los Angeles, California, 2018 Mobilising trompe-l’oeil techniques, the new façade composition transforms a nondescript mixed-use building into a new landmark for Los Angeles’ Chinatown.

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Atelier Manferdini, inVISIBLE façade design for Crystal City substation, Arlington, Virginia, 2023 In a nod to both the client and the programme, the chromatic field for this façade design is a vertical landscape split longitudinally in two.

The housing project Color by Number uses trees as a base image, but a process of scripting pixelates away any familiarity or fidelity to its organic referent. As was the case with the ‘Building Portraits’ series, a photographic image forms the starting point for a digital foray now realised into full-scale compositions. A seven-unit housing project provides the backdrop for a perception play that reverts to its analogue origins: a children’s game that has in recent years been marketed as a stress-relieving exercise for adults. The tiles take on the role of pixels that ‘colour in’ fields of varying green hues. Finally, inVISIBLE, a façade design for an energy substation near Crystal City in Virginia, consists of a horizontally bifurcated skin that promises to offer discrete experiences for pedestrians and drivers. The composition is achieved through a processing script that introduces glitches in the visualisation. Glitch effects have been popularised in video editing, but this project illustrates the potential of digital ‘errors’ at the building scale. As is the case with earlier applications, the effects do not have a functional impact, but they can alter user experience. Waves, shifts and doubling are brought to life with the utilisation of ceramic tiles. Sunset on the Horizon Many of Manferdini’s façades in Los Angeles and elsewhere often do double duty as billboards, meant to stop drivers literally in their tracks. We end where we began: if, as Banham notes, the Pacific at sunset owes its beauty to the divine, its hues are man-made. Surely, then, he is being ironic when he adds, ‘Enjoy it. The best of it doesn’t last long.’10 Despite imposing relatively strict emissions regulations, California’s cities have reported their highest ozone pollution numbers since 2010. While catastrophic wildfires have contributed to the rise, fossilfuel-based transportation remains the major culprit.11 As my own car stalls in traffic, I dwell on this grim milestone when, for a fleeting moment, my attention is diverted by a flickering chromatic field in my rear-view mirror. 1

Notes 1. Reyner Banham, ‘Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles’, BBC television documentary, 1972: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlZ0NbC-YDo. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Elena Manferdini, ‘Elena Manferdini Loves Los Angeles’, The Plan 95, December 2016– January 2017, p 38. 5. David Batchelor, Chromophobia, Reaktion Books (London), 2000, p 36. 6. ‘Jasmine Benyamin and Elena Manferdini Convene on Portraits and Landscapes’, 6 March 2020: https://www.sciarc.edu/news/2020/jasmine-benyamin-and-elena-manferdini. 7. Fernand Léger, ‘Modern Architecture and Color’ [1946], in Functions of Painting, Viking Press (New York), 1973, p 149. 8. Le Corbusier and Léger – Polychromatic Conversations, press kit, Centre Pompidou Metz, 2017, p 2: https://issuu.com/centre-pompidou-metz/docs/cpm_1495109187_46572. 9. Elena Manferdini, Portraits and Landscapes, Beijing University of Technology (Beijing), 2020, p 128. 10. ‘Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles’, op cit. 11. Susan Carpenter, ‘Los Angeles Ozone Pollution is the Highest It’s Been Since 2010’, Spectrum News 1, 21 April 2022: https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/ environment/2022/04/20/los-angeles-ozone-pollution-is-the-highest-it-s-been-since-2010.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 120–21 © SIGNS Istanbul; pp 122–3, 126(b), 127 © Atelier Manferdini; pp 124–5(b) Image courtesy of Elena Manferdini, UAP | Urban Art Projects and Rex Zou; p 125(t) © Brad Mitchell Cohen; p 126(t) © Joshua White

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A Word from 1 Editor Neil Spiller

Morphosis, Competition design for Artspark Performing Arts Pavilion, Los Angeles, California, 1989 A relatively early manifestation of the ‘split’ model exploring the integration of the linear building within its landscape, creating a series of topological archi-landscape set pieces.

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a conceptual spatial ordering system consisting of numerous façade screens of varying materiality both internally and externally. These screens allow vignettes of other spaces, are often penetrated by balconies or reveal splashes of colour inside their voids, and afford the whole development varying degrees of enclosure throughout the house – both expansive and intimate. The residence is situated on a fairly steep incline and this topography augments the sectional configuration. In contrast to the colourful drawings of the scheme, the model exhibits another of Morphosis’s early tropes: that of the monolithic base and model – the model growing its humanmade terrain out of its site, at one with nature’s geology. The composition of the building, its façade treatments and colour scheme put it right at the nexus of burgeoning Postmodernism, Californian vernacular and nascent architectural deconstructive tendencies. The whole exhibits a calming extrovert persona not prone to the more exuberant fetishes of Postmodernism such as keystones and other classical architectural quotations.

The meaning of ‘model’ can range from the loftiest notions of paragons and ideals through to the practical operations of gluing cardboard into 3D form, through to the most complex of digital constructions. —Mark Morris and Mike Aling, 20211 Over the last five decades, since its founding in 1972, Morphosis has explored and exploited the seductive power of the architectural model. To celebrate this halfcentury milestone in 2022, Stray Dog Café – the personal art and research space of Morphosis’s founder and principal, Thom Mayne – published a thousand-page epic tome called M3: modeled works in conjunction with Rizzoli.2 The book is arranged chronologically and is beautifully produced. It also demonstrates Morphosis’s continually evolving formal preoccupations as time has gone on and the technologies that had to be harnessed to explore them in model and built form. Whilst it is acknowledged that such preoccupations do not start or end as a new decade begins, it is still instructive to examine a model from each of the organisation’s fivedecade history. Microcosmic Metamorphosis The first design and model to consider is the Flores Residence, located in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. The house is an expansion of an existing building and was designed in 1979. It is characterised by its distinctive barrel-vaulted roof situated over its main volume and

Morphosis, Flores Residence, Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California, 1979 One of the first generation of Morphosis models, utilising the simpler possibilities and material choices of the time yet still demonstrating the practice’s emerging architectural dexterity.

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Ten years later, Morphosis having much enhanced their formal tactics in a series of domestic propositions/ buildings and larger cultural schemes, had developed an architectural lexicon that encompassed landscape, void/ mass contrast and a language of architectonic extrusion – where natural context and the elements of the building worked together in happy symbiosis. An example of this is the proposition for the Artspark Performing Arts Pavilion (1989), a project in the suburbs of Los Angeles. This work is very much a choreography of void and solid, light and dark, burying itself into the ground when it must and reaching out into its surrounding parkland when it needs to entice visitors. The model is much larger than the Flores Residence one, illustrating the greater opportunities the practice was getting at this time. This model is expansive and linear, and explores the episodic and highly articulated sculptural design of each piece and its relationship to other elements around them, yet not declaring all the proposal’s spatial pleasures held within.

Mixed Typologies Gates Hall is articulated to encourage serendipitous social and academic exchanges that would be more difficult in the traditionally structured university typology. Whilst it is widely recognised that collaboration between different disciplines optimises discovery of new ideas, protocols and methodologies, universities can generate ‘silo’ mentalities. Gates Hall utilises various strategies architecturally to mitigate these over-protective academic boundaries. The building creates (and therefore the model illustrates) much visual transparency, provoking unintended social interactions. It encourages its inhabitants to unite behind a shared educational mission, that of integrating computational and information science – its concepts, its algorithmic structures and its technologies – across every part of Cornell’s university community. The design of the building facilitates encounters and impromptu charrettes with alcove space along corridors. The fullheight glazing lining classrooms can be drawn and written on. The model of the scheme splits open to illustrate the permeability of its spaces and internal and external views.

Modelling for a New Century As the firm expanded further and the complexity of programmes and sites increased, more commissions and competitions were gleaned that facilitated an interest and expertise in not just the scale of a building (albeit sometimes large), but also the notion of the city and its various urban fabrics, interactions and infrastructures. An exquisite model and project from 1998 declares these preoccupations: the 101 Pedestrian Bridge. Cities suffer from the truncation of urban districts by roads and motorways. The 101 Pedestrian Bridge intervention was intended to mitigate such a fissure caused by the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles. Formally, the bridge consists of two key elements: a straight edge and a curved edge. Each of these pieces addresses a differing history and context. The straight side faces the contemporary Los Angeles to the south and the curved edge references back through history to the original civic space of the pueblo of Los Angeles. The structure is semi-transparent and permeable, creating a series of spaces that are both private and public, a mixture of art, event, promenade and contemporary piano nobile. The model accurately depicts the structure and its materiality, including its curved cor-ten weathered panel. Morphosis have always been keen to explore and utilise new technologies in their architecture and in their modes of representation, including models. The bridge’s electronic screen was to display the work of artist Jenny Holzer and a selection of programming appropriate to wider Angelino culture. This interest in a ‘Situationist’ approach to the fostering of fortuitous chance meetings, events and ambiences in the city was carried through, for example, over 10 years later, into an academic and research facility, the Bill and Melinda Gates Hall for Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (2011) – a centre for computation and information technologies.

Morphosis, 101 Pedestrian Bridge, Los Angeles, California, 1998 The scheme, composed of a series of geometric (the line and the arc) and material contrasts, articulates itself in relation to contemporary Los Angeles yet also references the city’s history to create a city living room and art space.

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If we jump nearly another decade and consider the Vanke Headquarters towers (2018), designed within the overarching Sponge City initiative of urban water management for Shenzhen in China, we observe another example of the Morphosis predilection for mixing and hybridising functions and programmes, and making multi-layer connections both internally to the building yet also externally to the surrounding city. This project combines corporate headquarters with offices, a dining hall, conference rooms, a hotel, sky gardens, cultural facilities, support spaces, commercial retail, parking and a public park, in a cluster of perforated and striated spaces. The Sponge City urban planning ideas were a reaction to the fact that due to urban development, much of China’s rainwater cannot be absorbed into the soil. It attempts to reuse at least 70 per cent of rainwater through green roofs, bioswales and roads that collect and store runoff.

The building encourages its inhabitants to unite behind a shared educational mission, that of integrating computational and information science

Morphosis, Bill and Melinda Gates Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 2011

Morphosis, Vanke Headquarters, Shenzhen, China, 2018 Part of the Sponge City initiative of urban water management, the Vanke proposal is an exercise that attempts to deal with the scarcity and management of water in urban areas combined with a majestic form that is practical as well as attractive.

The ‘split’ model is used here to illustrate the transparency of internal and external spaces within the building and their subsequent composite vistas and opportunities for social exchange.

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The ubiquitous rhythm of orthogonal urban blocks so common in commercial developments is subverted by splitting the block into four shard-like towers – treating each tower differently but maintaining its sense of a family group. This tactic also allows pedestrians into the centre of the site and creates, sheltered from the weather, retail space at ground level. The model communicates its parti and its massing; not every tower is the same height but each responds to its siblings, creating multiple ways of navigating the building and its multi-layered functions and landscapes. There is one senior sibling much higher than the others. The model also illustrates well which elements are transparent or translucent and which walls are penetrated with striated, horizontal strip windows punched into their more formally monolithic façades. After nearly 50 years of hybridising, striating, crossprogramming and generally mixing up architecture’s and landscape’s functions and elements, we arrive at the initial proposal for the Ningbo Oceanside Pavilions in the port city of Ningbo, Zhejiang province, China (2021). The project brief involved establishing a contemporary arts and cultural campus set within a natural park, intended for an audience of both local and international visitors. Its formal qualities again rely on an architecture that choreographs chance, both in the permeability of its site and landscape as well as its uses. It also references traditional Chinese gardens. Each pavilion has a unique character and identity, dedicated respectively to art, fine dining, a library and an architecture residency programme.

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A combinatorial strategy was adopted in the design of the pavilions and surrounding landscape, allowing chance to have a defining influence in the resulting forms The pavilions are positioned and sculpted to construct a relationship of water, greenery and landforms, with placements that frame other pavilions as scenic moments within the landscape. Each pavilion is part of a bespoke ‘family’. Emulating the asymmetry and irregularity of nature is a defining value of classical Chinese garden design. A combinatorial strategy was adopted in the design of the pavilions and surrounding landscape, allowing chance to have a defining influence in the resulting forms. In practice, this involved creating a system of formal primitives that could organise themselves according to a predefined set of rules and relationships, to generate ‘un-designed’ results while still achieving the performance and programmatic demands of each building or outdoor space. Model-making has also become hybridised more and more over the years. The Ningbo model utilises all manner of techniques and materials – 3D printing, gypsum powder, clear binder, acrylic, birch plywood, aluminium, two-part epoxy adhesive, cyanoacrylate glue, Dow Corning® 995 structural adhesive, screws, nails and paint – a mixture of high- and low-tech techniques making an exquisite representation of the proposition. If you are searching for a book that lays bare the evolution and development of a world-renowned practice over a half-century lifespan and reveals its preoccupations and tangents through the microcosm of its models, then this is the book for you! Californian dreamings of five decades. 1

Morphosis, Ningbo Oceanside Pavilions, Ningbo, China, 2021 above: The pavilions are a masterful juxtaposition of figure and ground, solid and mass, artfully negotiating their landscape to create a symphony of form and placement. opposite: The forms of the pavilions have their own identity yet come together to create a coherent network of spaces within the development as a whole.

Notes 1. Mark Morris and Mike Aling, ‘Introduction: Scaling Up – The Many Worlds of the Architectural Model’, 2 Worldmodelling: Architectural Models in the 21st Century, May/June (no 3), 2021, p 7. 2. Morphosis, M3: modeled works, Stray Dog Café / Rizzoli (New York), 2022.

Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 128 © Courtesy Morphosis, photo Tom Bonner; pp 129, 130–31(b), 131(br), 132–3 © Courtesy Morphosis, photo Jasmine Park; p 131(tl) © Courtesy Morphosis, photo Dan Wilby

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CALIFORNIA DREAMING

Frances Anderton covers Los Angeles design and architecture in print, broadcast media and public events. Her most recent book is Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles (Angel City Press, 2022). For many years she hosted ‘DnA: Design and Architecture’ for the KCRW public radio station. ‘Wasted: Neat Solutions to the Dirty Problem of Waste’, a series she co-produced for KCRW's ‘Greater LA’ show, won a 2022 Golden Mike award for Best Feature News Series Reporting. She co-created the 2022 public symposium ‘Seeding the City: In Harmony With Nature’, a show of architectural work by James Hubbell, and the 2021 exhibition ‘Low Rise Mid Rise High Rise: Housing in LA Today’.

Blaine Brownell is an architect, educator and researcher of emergent materials and applications. A former Fulbright scholar to Japan, he has authored nine books on advanced and sustainable materials for architecture and design. He has written the ‘Mind & Matter’ column for Architect magazine since 2009, and his work has been published in over 70 architecture, design, science and news journals including the New York Times, London Times, Wall Street Journal and Nature. His book The Pandemic Effect (Princeton Architectural Press, 2023) addresses the inoculation of the built environment.

Jasmine Benyamin is a lecturer at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Architecture in Los Angeles, having previously served as Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning. Her interdisciplinary research addresses architectural manifestations in art practice and popular culture. In addition to editing and translating several books on architecture, her essays have appeared in numerous journals. Her most recent book is MASTERcrit (ORO Editions, 2022). She received a BA in Architecture and French Literature from Columbia University in New York, an MArch from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and a PhD from Princeton University, New Jersey.

Courtney Coffman is Manager of Lectures and Publications at Princeton University’s School of Architecture. She has served as a content- and copy-editor for various architectural publications and monographs. Her own writings explore the visual culture and relational aesthetics of contemporary architecture and design alongside alternative histories and popular taste. She holds an MA in Architecture from UCLA’s School for Architecture and Urban Design in the Critical Studies Program, along with a Master of Architectural Studies in Criticism and a Bachelor of Science in Design from the Ohio State University.

Brennan Buck is a principal at FreelandBuck in New York City, and a senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture. His writing on technology and representation within the discipline of architecture has been published in numerous academic and professional journals. Prior to teaching at Yale, he was an assistant professor in Studio Greg Lynn at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. He has worked in the offices of Neil M Denari Architects (NMDA) and Johnston Marklee & Associates in Los Angeles, and holds an MArch from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Architecture and Urban Design.

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Heather Flood is a visionary educator and a designer. She is the Interim Dean of Woodbury School of Architecture in California, where she teaches studios with a focus on beginning design education. She is a passionate advocate of design education and works to construct curricula and culture that nurture talent. She is the founder and principal of F-lab, a design practice that integrates the disciplines and techniques of cultural research, graphic art and architectural design to produce experientially dense environments. Her work has been published and exhibited internationally.

CONTRIBUTORS

David Freeland is a principal at FreelandBuck in Los Angeles, and design faculty at the University of Southern California (USC). He has worked with architecture offices in Los Angeles and New York, including Michael Maltzan Architecture and Peter Eisenman Architects. He holds a BSArch from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and a MArch from the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design. FreelandBuck has been recognised as a member of the Architectural League of New York’s 2019 Emerging Voices, the 2017 Architectural Record Design Vanguard, and as a 2018 MOMA PS1 Young Architects Program Finalist. Aaron Gensler is an architect, educator and thought leader based in Los Angeles. She is one half of GenslerClipp, an architecture, design and research practice based in Southern California. Prior to forming GenslerClipp, she held design positions at a diverse array of firms from Los Angeles to Rwanda. In addition to her professional work, she is the Chair of the Undergraduate and Graduate Architecture Programs at Woodbury University. She serves on the National Council for Madame Architect and is a member of the Board of Trustees for the California College of the Arts. Craig Hodgetts co-founded award-winning Hodgetts+Fung with Hsin-Ming Fung in 1984, and since 1991 has been Professor of Architecture at UCLA. The practice focuses on architectural design, innovative material fabrication, historic adaptation and exhibition design. Arriving in Los Angeles from New York City after Yale, his early projects included the South Side Settlement (Columbus), Mobile Theatre and Gagosian Gallery in Venice, California. H+F's work ranges from the Temporary Powell (Towell) Library at UCLA, exhibition designs for ‘Blueprints for Modern Living’ (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1989–90), ‘California Design, 1930–1969’ (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011), and Charles and Ray Eames (Vitra Design Museum), the reimagined Hollywood Bowl with its acoustic halo, restored Egyptian Theatre (Hollywood) and Wild Beast Concert Hall (CalArts).

Max Kuo is a partner of ALLTHATISSOLID and a full-time lecturer at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. His writings and creative practice engage the effects of post-digital networks on cultural forms and perception. Nicole Meyer is a writer and archivist living and working in Los Angeles. She received a Master of Library and Information Science from UCLA in 2020, where she focused primarily on issues in archiving and preserving born-digital architectural records. She serves as the firm archivist for Morphosis Architects. Eva Menuhin has been a London-based freelance writer and copy-editor for the last 25 years, specialising in academic and professional architectural written texts. Her experience includes working with the late Sir Philip Dowson, Ian Ritchie, the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture, Stufish Entertainment Architects and 2. She studied Italian and Linguistics at Stanford University, California. Grace Mitchell Tada is a writer and editor based in San Francisco. Her work focuses on climate change, the built environment and cultural histories, and has been published by the New York Times, Landscape Architecture Magazine and Hakai, among others. She is the coeditor, with Walter Hood, of Black Landscapes Matter (UVA Press, 2020) and Memorial to Our Ancestors (Monacelli Press, 2023). Jill Stoner is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has taught in the department of architecture for 28 years. In 2020 she completed a term as Director of the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of Poems for Architects (William Stout Publishers, 2001), an anthology of 48 poems that reveal transformations of spatial sensibility throughout the 20th century, and of Toward a Minor Architecture (MIT Press, 2012), which advocates for a more politicised approach to the built environment. She is also guest-editor, with Ozayr Saloojee, of 2 Architectures of Refusal (November/December 2022).

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