TOM WISCOMBE DESIGN - Writings and Interviews

Patchiness
OnRamp, SCI-Arc, October, 2012

Buildings are always patchworks of different materials, usually materials side-by-side. In the 20th century this often meant that one material would infill a frame made of another material. Mies built a career framing and infilling in the most elegant ways, but was constrained in terms of articulation to the edges of materials—the steel detailing of the frames themselves. Of course, it is now assumed that his dissatisfaction with this condition led him to begin to attempt to articulate the surface itself by welding ornamental steel profiles onto the face of the Seagram Building. This fact is sometimes regarded as an anomaly of Modernism rather than as a productive mutation bringing the discipline one step closer to Postmodernism and a re-engagement of the surface as the site of articulation. The materiality of the postmodern surface was stucco based, which could be discussed in terms of its superficiality if one...

Beyond Assemblies: Systems Convergence and Multi-materiality
BioInspiration & Biomimetics, ed. Petra Gruber and George Jeronimidis, 2012

The architectural construction industry has become increasingly more specialized over the past fifty years, creating a culture of layer-thinking over part-to-whole thinking. Building systems and technologies are often cobbled together in conflicting and uncorrelated ways, even when referred to as "integrated", such as by way of building information modeling (BIM). True integration of building systems requires rethinking how systems and architectural morphologies can push and pull on one another, creating not only innovation in technology but in aesthetics. The revolution in composite materials, with unprecedented plasticity and performance features, opens up a huge range of possibilities for achieving this kind of convergence. Composites by nature fuse...

The Contemporary Art of Tracery
MATTER, ed. Gail Borden and Michael Meredith, 2011

At the beginning of the 21st century, following the death of the 'single surface' project in digital design, a sudden interest in tectonic discretization and componentry emerged. To some degree this development can be attributed to the first generation of digital designers beginning to tire of virtual continuity in the form of endless blank surfaces, moving toward fine-grained surface articulation driven by material limits and available production methods. Since then, a huge amount of work has been undertaken in this area, with issues ranging from buildability and cost-effectiveness, to the aesthetic implications of CNC tooling, to the use of parametrics to generate variable panelization across surfaces. Parametric discretization, in particular, has taken the discipline by storm, with its seductive implications of being an art form conveniently couched in an economic model...

Extreme Integration
AD: Exuberance, ed. Marjan Coletti, 2010

In Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil, there is an unforgettable scene where Robert De Niro, a guerrilla air-conditioning repairman, responds to an urgent call for help from a sweating man. He has intercepted a call directed to the totalitarian state parodied in the film, and drops in out of nowhere to assist. De Niro removes a standardised interior panel from a wall, and mechanical systems behind literally pour out onto the floor in a shower of sparks and feeble pulsations. As he makes illegal repairs to the jumble of tubes and wires and ducts, he reveals his motivation: 'I came into this game for the action, the excitement, going anywhere. I travel light, get in, get out, wherever there's trouble.'

Brazil depicts a dystopian world in decline characterised by failing infrastructure and decadent culture. In its focus on dysfunctional infrastructure...

Structural Ecologies
AADCU Monograph, Tom Wiscombe, 2009

A menagerie of geometries has been developed in the office over the past few years which we use for various projects. They are really prototypes, neither a chunk of building nor a detail. These prototypes are studies of structural, mechanical, and circulatory behavior, particularly in terms of their feedback, collapse, or hybridization as systems. All projects are driven by one or more prototypes, in combination with more prosaic issues of building massing and program. Prototypes are sometimes digitally animated to reveal their range of behavior, in terms of geometric syntax, growth patterns, depth variability, and transformative capabilities such as delaminating, branching, cellularizing, lightening, or thickening. Beam-branes, surface-to-strand hybrids, and hydronic armatures constitute geometric/performative species that link recent projects within a kind of taxonomy...

Out of the Lab, Into the Jungle II
FORWARD, September, 2009

Have you ever heard of the Bowerbird?

This bird, known to animal cognition experts but not so much to architects, is intriguing because it appears to exist at the edge of consciousness, driven by both bottom-up instinct as well as what appears to be taste. In order to attract female mates, male birds build an audacious 'mating-stage', characterized by ornate thatch-work, berry-juice paint, and colorful collections of organic and synthetic objects. This is not a nest, but a girl-magnet, and while it is evidence of the male's prowess and ability to procure resources, its primary expression is of the male's aesthetic sensibility in construction. Females are highly discerning-- they look for formal coherency, color composition, and construction innovation in these stages. According to James and Carol Gould, authors of The Animal Architect, the male's...

Pretensions of Form: A Conversation
LOG, Fall, 2009

Hammering away at the relation between 'superficial' and 'serious' might reinforce a binary way of thinking on the subject. I think Jeff Kipnis is right that good architecture operates simultaneously on multiple ontological levels; for me, making connections between the realms of exotic beauty and performance (in that order) is one way of achieving that kind of complexity. A thing can exist simultaneously as an architectural "delight", which is emotional and immediate, and something that does work, which requires thinking and is delayed.

Look at the Agamid lizard from Australia: its skin is a wild composite of deep grooves, micro-relief, and color variegation which can neither be unwound from one another nor associated conclusively with any particular function. But it turns out that this patterning does in fact do work such as channeling water from its back to its mouth...

Out of the Lab, Into the Jungle
Insect Nest to Human Architecture, ed. Guy Theraulaz, 2009

In 2009, algorithmic or 'swarm architecture' is at a critical juncture: it is seductive and ubiquitous, but at the same time often misunderstood in terms of its accomplishments to date. It's important to look at its successes and failures with fresh eyes rather than continue to promote it as if it is permanently pioneering. In its actual pioneering phase in architecture, during the mid- 1990's, swarm architecture was highlighted by work from Karl Chu, Marcos Novak, and Greg Lynn, and the parallel criticism of Jeff Kipnis, Manual Delanda, and Sanford Kwinter. This group, although it by no means ever operated under the flag of 'swarm architecture', set the stage for thinking about a new architecture which could capitalize on iterative computational techniques as well as deal with new discoveries in science related to complexity theory, evolutionary biology, and emergence. It was a perfect storm which yielded...

EMERGENT MODELS OF ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE
Yale Perspecta #38, 2006

The idea that innovation, whether scientific, technological, or architectural, is a byproduct of artistic chance or a result of singular genius can no longer be sustained in the 21 " century. Complexity theory reveals that innovation - the creation of the new - is the direct result of bottom-up evolutionary processes. Science knows this; industry is learning. Architecture is just beginning to engage the concept.

In order to move into this space of innovation, architects will have to accept the value of multiplicity and dynamic feedback over the retrograde nature of authority. They will have to accept that architecture might not be about essences and theoretical positions, but rather about exchanges of techniques, expertises and materialities in multiple industries. They will have to accept the architecture is no longer a heroic center, but one micro-intelligence among many...

Emergent Processes
OZ #27, 2005

This century is going to be about biology. I don't want to confuse architecture with biology. You can take analogies too far of course. But, as Godei once said in his Theory of lncompleteness, sometimes to solve a problem in a particular discipline, you have to switch to completely different territory.

Architecture and biology at first glance do not appear to be so different- both are materially and organization ally based, both are concerned with morphology and structuring. Both are wound together by multiple simultaneous systems and drives, and probably most important for us here, both are constructed out of parts operating as collectives. While buildings, and to a lesser extent organisms (especially the human kind), may often be laden with content or meaning, that seems to be culturally transient and not particularly informative for either on the level of material dynamics and properties...

Interview: Objects vs. Parts
Estonian Academy of the Arts, March, 2013

Yes, I am currently consciously avoiding some of the discourse on correlated systems and part-to-whole relations, which have both become dogma, especially in light of wide acceptance of certain digital techniques, in the last decade. It’s that moment, which of course happens every so often, that things which seem solid melt into air, as Marx said in his moment. It is actually funny how a theoretic framework- let’s say, for the sake of discussion, a Deleuzian framework- which is ostensibly about intensive forces, affiliations, and relations can become so entrenched and inflexible. Deleuzian thinking is by no means exhausted, to be clear, but the minute we start believing that any theory from outside architecture can fully describe the complex web of aesthetics, materiality, technology, and politics that constitutes architecture, we have a problem...

Subdivisions, Squishing, and Objects in Objects
suckerPUNCH, March, 2013

For the past two years I have been focusing on the relationships between objects, and what I call ‘the problem of subdivisions’. ‘Subdivisions’ has two meanings for me. The first is in terms of how buildings can be dealt with in terms of wholes rather than part-to-whole relations. I am tired of how building massing, interior, articulation, and ground tend to be dealt with hierarchically in contemporary architecture, or one after the other, towards a consequent and linear relation of systems and subsystems.
Imagine instead a horizontal plane, where massing, interior, articulation, and ground are things-in-themselves, and can all influence each other equally but differently. One cannot usurp or subjugate another.

Parametrics are certainly part of a major revolution...

Interview: The Status of Subdivisions
Onramp SCI-Arc, January, 2013

I’m not interested in geometry per se – the words form, shape, geometry are used so interchangeably within architecture I think we have to be precise here. Geometry assumes the existence of a deep logic or rule set as a driver, and by talking about that, we assign those logics value. There is a long history of architects trying to associate certain geometries with certain structural efficiencies which is I think banal. I’m more interested in hybrid objects and forms which have inventive and seductive features, much like animals in the wild. Things that are weird, patchy, cross-categorical. I’m not interested in tapping into some kind of cosmological truth or in the perfect alignment of systems and formal types.

Parametrics are certainly part of a major revolution in architecture, and have become critical for the delivery of buildings, there is no doubt. But I think that parametrics...

Interview by Nina Rappaport
Constructs Yale Architecture, Fall 2012

Nina Rappaport: Since you started your LA-based firm Emergent in 1999, the form and structure of animal and natural elements has influenced your work. How has it changed specifically in the past few years from direct metaphors and analogies to the design of actual buildings.

Tom Wiscombe: I am less interested pushing the science of biology into architecture these days and have gotten more interested in how certain organizational and visual aspects of biology can infiltrate the discipline of architecture. Especially in terms of systems, materials, and skins. One of my favorite terms is features, which refers to things which articulate form. The big polarity in architecture is the degree to which superficial features have to do with underlying features, or the degree to which there is a complete independence between the two. Darwin’s ideas about natural selection in the 19th...

Interview: Semi-Rigid Car
Bliss Magazine, January, 2013

Here’s how I see it- if last century was all about mineral materials like metals, then this century is all about polymers and composite materials. It used to be that a material had a fixed look and structural capacity associated with it, and if you needed different rigidities, opacities, or colors, you would collage materials together and use hardware to join them. But because of advanced in applied materials, it is becoming a reality that materials themselves can be transformed internally to provide different effects, and hardware disappears entirely. It’s more like chemistry than assembly. The revolution in multi-material 3D printing is really exciting because it gives us the first glimpses of how things might be grown out of mixtures of polymers and how materials can be nested inside one another. Right now you can only make something the size of a dog with this technology but I am convinced that you will be seeing...

Interview by Hernan Diaz Alonso
SCI-Arc Magazine, October 2011

In the permanent state of arrival and departure that defines SCI-Arc, the role of the faculty is of course critical, but is not about finding individuals who fits within a dogma. Instead, we like to think, it's about identifying some very specific and hopefully important part of the larger architectural conversation that is, right now, at a critical inflection point, and people who are pushing and defining it. Always looking for an ingenious way to push it in a new direction. If we are to be successful in challenging the individual the individual will challenge us, it will make everybody who is already part of that conversation stop and change what they are thinking based on what we have contributed.

Tom Wiscombe is one of those forces, his work since his days as the Senior Designer in Coop Himmelblau, until today with his own firm; his work is always at the...

Interview by Olaf Winkler
BUILD Magazine, 2010

A major characteristic of your working philosophy is the integration of other disciplines and sciences into the architectural work, introducing the latter into a far bigger framework. Could you elaborate on that a bit more? What are the main fields of interest outside the "traditional" architectural world from which you draw further knowledge, what are the aims?

I am actually torn on this subject because although I do believe that disciplinary crossovers are critical to architecture's evolution, as I get older I am more and more convinced that architecture is a distinct form of knowledge. But I wouldn't go so far, as some people do, to say that it is autonomous. I just believe in expertise, and that architecture gets weakened when it becomes a medium for reflecting the agendas of other disciplines...

Interview by Tracey Woods
ADAM & EVE Magazine, 2008

You're inspired by natural structures, like plants and insects. How are you working this into buildings?

Many of the things that inspire my work now are linked to biology. A certain kind of biology though, a messy biology. The biology of excess and not efficiency. It is infuriating how often I hear about the perfection of biology and how things that are in nature are the "best of all possible" solutions to problems. That idea leaves out the very things that create difference: mutation, randomness, evolutionary dead-ends, and so on. Nature is exceedingly beautiful and I am in awe of how organic features build up and become obfuscated, fuse, embed, and become co-opted for behaviors which they did not originally support. An ecology is surprisingly resilient, but not clean or optimal. Ecologies work based on redundancies and overlaps...

Interview by Tracey Woods
DUDYE Creative Warrior Magazine, April, 2010

What has built the fascination for synergistic effects?

This comes from both an intuitive and an intellectual place. I have always been interested in natural systems: plants and animals and ecologies. When I look at the diversity of species in the rainforest, I always think, why doesn't architecture have this kind of diversity? Of course I know why, but the question just doesn't seem to go away for me. The diversity is in terms of visible features and embedded behaviors, not just one or the other. For a while now I have been trying to bring the idea of features and behaviors together in a profession which seems to cycle between promoting one or the other. Sustainability is one example of how behavior is being promoted at the expense of architectural features, and the digital Neo-baroque is an example of how form is being promoted at the expense of behavioral robustness...