Fall Lecture Series: Jason Payne

Jason Payne, Principal, Hirsuta, Laurel Canyon, CA

Lecture Title: SUBPOP, or, Still Keeping It On the Downlow

Jason Payne is principal of Hirsuta and Associate Professor of Architecture at UCLA. Committed to the synthesis of scholarship and practice, Jason Payne ranks among the most influential designers and educators in his generation (X.) A member of the inaugural class of Columbia University’s “Paperless Studio” Payne’s work reflects the paradigmatic shift from traditional to digital methods and sensibilities in architectural design. His research and practice engages two problems central to discourse and scholarship in the field: 1) theorizing architectural form as it is impacted by developments in computation, and 2) advancing architecture’s capacity to absorb principles from other fields. Reflected in projects, writing, and teaching, these lines of inquiry have played a measurable role in moving discourse on computational design from early technophilic origins toward a larger cultural appeal. Projects such as Purple Haze (2006 MoMA/PS1 finalist) and NGTV™ Bar (2006 AIA Design Honor Award) exemplify this impulse, as do such texts as “Hair and Makeup” (Log 17,) “The Agony and the Ecstasy” (with Sanford Kwinter, From Control to Design,) and “Subpop” (ACSA Proceedings.) Recent projects Raspberry Fields, Rawhide, and Planetesimal Series I and II and the texts “The Ambivalent Object” (Project Two) and “Projekti Bunkerizimit” (Log 31) reinforce Payne’s position at the leading edge of contemporary architectural thought.