Jason Payne: American Gothic

04.08.09 | W. M. Keck Lecture Hall l 7pm Jason Payne has worked as project designer for Reiser + Umemoto/RUR Architects and Daniel Libeskind Studio and co-partnered the award winning office Gnuform, best known for the NGTV™ Bar (2006 AIA Design Award) and the 2006 PS1 entry “Purple Haze.” With the launch of his new office, Hirsuta, Payne continues to promote a new materialism with a distinctly sensual bias. Informed by intensive research and an experimental approach, his work engages material dynamics in the production of form to create a direct appeal to the senses. Hirsuta pursues both built and speculative projects, generally at the small to medium-scale. The office is a full service architectural, interior, landscape, and object design firm specializing in advanced form and the integration of emerging technologies in construction. Payne’s work and research is characterized by unusual couplings of intrinsic architectural values with such exotic extrinsic influences as botany and hairstyling. His work establishes credibility for these strange hybrids and is distinguished by its extreme specificity, technical complexity, commitment to materialization, and the frequent use of rich colors and textures. Payne has established a reputation as a leading designer in his generation. His work of recent years is credited as being a major influence in pushing digital design and fabrication away from an overt focus on technique and process toward the explicit celebration of product, experience, affect, and atmosphere. He holds degrees from SCI-Arc and Columbia, and is currently on faculty at UCLA. Sci-Arc Lectures