Fabrication: The Fifth Ecology of Los Angeles

By Michael Speaks

	Audio Features
	David Erdman, principal of servo Florencia Pita, principal of fpmod Hernan Diaz Alonso, principal of xefirotarch & Tom Wiscombe, principal of emergent   Jason Payne, principal of gnuform Emmanuelle Bourlier & Andreas Froech, Panelite

Almost everyone agrees with architectural historian Reyner Banham that Los Angeles is an especially sympathetic ecology for architectural design. Banham catalogued in his brilliant study, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, the natural and artificial conditions that have nourished a history of architectural experimentation extending from Rudolf Shindler to the Eamses, Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne. In an attempt to discover what continues to make Los Angeles such a sympathetic ecology for experimental architecture, we interviewed seven young architects who recently set up practices here. All are in their 30s and part of a first wave of digitally trained architects who migrated west in search of what David Erdman of servo calls a more blue collar approach to the use of the computer. Each was asked why they came to the city and how, if at all, it has affected their work. For Jason Payne of gnuform, Los Angeles provided an opportunity, as he says, “to strain through materiality” the more abstract formal experimentation his office had been pursuing in New York. Emmanuelle Bourlier and Andreas Froech set up the Los Angeles office of Panelite to conduct material research for OMA’s Prada Store in Beverly Hills and for the San Francisco store that was never built.

While each came for different reasons, all agree that it is Los Angeles’s unique culture of fabrication that make it one of the most exciting places to practice in the world today. Drawing on the expertise of fabricators working with Los Angeles-based aerospace,automotive, and entertainment industries, these and other area architects are beginning to materialize designs that until recently were trapped inside their computers. What seems especially appealing is the willingness of Los Angeles fabricators to take on jobs that require extraordinary flexibility in schedule, budget and specifications of final product. This looseness and embrace of collaboration has fostered a design culture in which fabrication has become an increasingly important engine of design innovation. Architects design by making, by fabricating, which enables them to quickly learn from successes and failures, building the design intelligence required of more refined and robust designs. Such design-by-fabrication can be seen in Florencia Pita’s recently completed “Pulse: Tendril Formations,” part of an installation series at SCI-Arc that allows young architects to experiment by building at full scale. We discussed Los Angeles’s unique culture of design-by-fabrication with Pita and with Tom Wiscombe and Hernan Diaz Alonso, two Los Angeles based architects and past winners of the PS1 Young Architects Program competition in Queens, New York, perhaps the best known installation competition that allows young architects to build at full scale.

		Michael Speaks

If Banham were updating his study of Los Angeles today, he might include a section on the “fifth ecology” of fabrication, which is making the city a location of choice for a generation of digitally trained architects eager to move their designs from the computer to the street. As Andreas Froech observed, the new panels they are developing at Panelite are becoming increasingly important as architects trained to design on the computer require lighter, more luminous, and more energy efficient materials to transform the exquisite, translucent walls and spaces on their screens into material form. Los Angeles, due largely to the culture of fabrication that it has engendered, continues to provides a sympathetic ecology for such transformations, and as such remains one of the most important centers of architectural innovation in the world today.