Emergent Architecture

Build, 2010
Build

Conservation, 2010
Conservation

BEYOND Magzine, 2010
BEYOND Magazine

Architects Newspaper, 2010
AIA

Inhabitat Magazine, 2010
Inhabitat Magazine

KCRW, 2010
KCRW

Extreme Integration, 2010
AD: Exuberance

The Creative Warrior, 2010
DUDYE

Fast Company, 2010
Fast Company

SPACE, 2010
SPACE

Naturliche Faszinationen, 2010
Archithese

DUDYE, 2010
DUDYE

Prime, 2010
PRIME

Most Contagious, 2009
Contagious Magazine

Pretension of Form: A Conversation, 2009
Log

Ornament, 2009
AIA

Tom Wiscombe x Hernan Diaz Alonso, 2009
Adam&Eve

Photosynthesis Walls, 2009
First Look

Smart Surfaces, 2009
Smart Surfaces

Out of the Lab, into the Jungle, 2009
From Insect Nest to Human Architecture

Dezeen, 2009
Dezeen

ICON - 20/20, 2009
ICON

Monument - 91, 2009
Monument

Architecture Now! 6, 2009
Taschen

Digital Diagram II, 2008
Archiworld

MoMA Highlights since 1980, 2008
MoMA

Bioconstructivism - Italy, 2009
l'ARCA

The New Architectural Generation by Kieran Long, 2008
HATCH

Chernikhov Award Catalog - Russia, 2008
ICIF

La (re)emergencia de la artquingenieria - Mexico, 2009
FAHRENHEIT

Architecture & Design - Ukraine, 2009
A&D

Architecture and Culture - Korea, 2008
Architecture and Culture

Willd Structures - China, 2008
Vision Magazine

Form Magazine - November/December, 2008
Form Magazine

Digital Architecture Now by Neil Spiller, 2008
Digital Architecture Now

Interview by Tracey Woods, 2008
Adam and Eve Magazine

Inhabitat, 2008
Inhabitat

Archinect, 2008
Archinect

A+U - August, 2008
A+U

'Contemporary Ornament' by Robert Levit, 2008
Harvard Design Magazine

'Contemporary Ornament' by Robert Levit, 2008
Harvard Design Magazine

Architecture & Culture Magazine - February, 2008
Architecture & Culture Magazine

ICON - October, 2007
ICON

Digital Diagram, 2007
Archiworld

INTERIOR WORLD - 59, 2007
INTERIOR WORLD

INTERIOR WORLD - 57, 2007
INTERIOR WORLD

ESQUIRE - July, 2007
ESQUIRE JAPAN

ICON - Manifesto # 34, 2007
ICON

National Library of the Czech Republic, 2007
Concept

National Library of the Czech Republic, 2007
Wettbewerbe Aktuell

'Emergent Modes of Practice', 2006
Yale Perspecta #38

Lotus Lantern, 2006
Seoul Competition Book
"Lotus Lantern" (Editor), 2006

IF...THEN: Architectural Speculations (Anne Rieselbach, Stan Allen), 2005
Architectural League: YAP 6

Emergent Processes, 2006
OZ 27: Process

Radiant Living' (Peter Hall), 2005
Metropolis
Most architects go to some lengths to hide the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems in their buildings, but recent history has been marked by some notable exceptions—famously Renzo Piano (more) and Richard Rogers’s Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, which sported ductwork on its exterior. A project by the firm Emergent—a concept for a “Radiant Hydronic House,” which will be on show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this October—goes a step further by proposing a heating-and-cooling system as the defining structure of a building and a “performative” feature of its spaces. The concept house—a runner-up in the Metropolis Next Generation Design Competition earlier this year—is formed around a central armature for moving heat, air, electricity, and data, which doubles as the building’s structure, folding and turning to form ramps and bridges.

The design, which was commissioned by a film director and a T.V. writer for a site in west Los Angeles, revisits the eco-idealism of 1960s architecture with less sentimentality and a lot more technology. In winter, rooftop thermal pools of radiator fluid collect solar heat, which is redirected to the rest of the house. In summer, liquid is replaced by air, as louvers open up in the roof, drawing westerly night winds through the spine to cool the floor slab. The central HVAC system becomes an aesthetic feature of the house with the help of transparent materials and water features—including warm baths. “We have these flowing liquid elements and radiant pools—not just on the roof but inside the house,” Emergent principal Tom Wiscombe says. “You can get into the pools at some points, and other times they’re behind glass in the floor; you’ll be living on a glass floor with glowing radiant elements down below.”

The idea of turning structure into decoration marks a shift in architecture that has emerged with the use of digital design and fabrication methods, according to SF MoMA curator Joseph Rosa, who selected Emergent’s project for the upcoming show Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture. The Radiant Hydronic House will share a room with a model of Herzog & De Meuron’s Prada Tokyo building, examples of what Rosa calls the “monocoque box.” As he explains, “The simple definition of a monocoque is where structure and surface become one, and Tom’s building does that.”

A network of architects who maintain active roles at larger firms (Wiscombe is a senior designer in the Vienna-based Coop Himmelb(l)au), Emergent was behind the 2003 P.S.1/MoMA Urban Beach project and has two ongoing house projects. But the group’s gurgling, energy-efficient hydronic home will not be built. The patrons, Wiscombe laments, “decided to rent.”

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New York Calor, 2005
Arquitectura y Critica

Constellations in Practice' (Greg Lynn), 2005
PRAXIS
Tom Wiscombe, a senior designer for Coop Himmelblau, leads a design practice known as Emergent. Next ENTERprise and Wiscombe (perhaps as a result of their contact with Wolf Prix) have both been able t (more) o rapidly focus on a formal and material vocabulary that sustains research and development at an early moment in their careers.

Whereas next ENTERprise consistently works through a combination of of light frames and planes with chunky spheroid masses, Wiscombe floats glowing blood orange glass volumes nested in crenelated metal facets. Wiscombe’s PS1 installation (2003) set a new standard for architectural sophistication at the venue because of its integration of structure, lighting, shelter, furniture, and landscape as well as the discreteness of each of these systems. Instead of opting for a big expressive shape realized in whatever material is expedient and then later trespassed by used that are itinerant to the original shape, he defined a vocabulary of elements and harmonized them in concert with one another while maintaining an overall coherence and ambience.

Like next ENTERprise, Servo, and OCEAN, Wiscombe controls the spatial and material qualities of the design medium as well as construction techniques to avoid realizing a large gesture in an ad hoc way. To date, all of Emergent’s proposals exhibit a similar choreography of design and construction technique.

This project, along with Doug Garofalo’s temporary installation at Chicago’s MoCA and Toyo Ito and Zaha Hadid’s temporary Serpentine Pavillions in London, begin to suggest temporary museums as the most fertile location for design innovation in the field at the moment.

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Machine in the Garden' (Joseph Giovaninni), 2005
Architectural Digest
In the spirit of venturing something to gain something, architects sometimes float a design for a house “on spec” for a prospective client with a chunk of land. The iffiness of the deal is liberating. (more) Since they have little to lose, architects often push the venture toward adventure: They may not get the job, but the experimentation expands their range. “Spec” in this case means speculative thinking – architects build on their own designs, using even small structures as cornerstones of vision.

Several years ago a family friend of architect Tom Wiscombe`s was thinking about building a house on a hillside property in Los Angeles. Wiscombe offered “a sit-down, have-a-dink, take-a-look proposal, to whet his appetite,” he says. “It was a pitch.”

Wiscombe, who most recently has taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), is based in Los Angeles but, through his firm, Emergent, works in association with other architects in a bicontinental practice that the cellular phone and e-mail have made possible: Though he splits his time between Europe and America, Wiscombe is always reachable.

Last spring the 33-year-old won the annual competition sponsored by New York`s Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1, MoMA`s affiliate, to design a temporary cultural-event space in the courtyard at P.S.1, located in Long Island City, for its annual summer festival, Urban Beach. New Yorkers sunbathed on its angular platforms and dipped in wading pools, all under elongated metal parasols that looked like canoes in a logjam: The gauzy canopies, made of aluminium wrapped around steel frames, transformed at night into a light show worthy of a fantasy disco.

In Los Angeles, his prospective client wanted “an endless-porch kind of house”, says Wiscombe, one with a strong indoor-outdoor relationship negotiated with many windows. The interior itself was to be loftlike, open except for two spaces dedicated as home offices. A stream meandered through the site. Even at 5,000 square feet, the design was so rudimentary that the house took the form of a garden pavilion, a building type that is privileged in architectural history because the demands are so simple that the designs become manifestos of the underlying architectural principles. Whether by Schinkel in early-19th-century Berlin or Mies van der Rohe in 20th-century Chicago, such pavilions reveal philosophical intentions, especially man`s attitude toward nature.

The 20th century`s contribution to the tradition of the pavilion was the machine in the garden, the industrially produced modular house made of steel with walls of sliding glass. Wiscombe subscribes to the concept of the pavilion whose manufactured parts-“ prefabricated in Poland or Philadelphia, wherever it`s cheapest,” he says- arrived on the bed of a truck for on-site assembly.

But Wiscombe updates the concept. Instead of using standardized elements to produce generic boxes that enclose universal space, he devises a structure that breeds diversity. The components are gyroscopic, turning and changeable rather than fixed, a system able to perform what Wiscombe calls “highend” custom detailing. “The goal is to design standard parts capable of variability in order to create new kinds of flows through the space,” he says.

The building, which has been dubbed MicroMultipleHouse, is composed of segmented steel trusses some 40 feet long and eight to 10 feet high whose parts turn on universal joints that allow for adaptation. Some turn horizontally and function more like a web of beams; others ratchet in segments. The structure continues to perform even when it turns. “The idea was that the parts could behave by reacting to local conditions and specific needs,” says Wiscombe. “They could hybridise. The same truss could go from being a roof piece to a wall piece and then to a bridge. The joints would allow it to twist and lock into place, and then you clad the truss with sheet steel so that structure merges with surface in a new kind of continuity.”

Los Angeles, of course, has its fair share of garden pavilions, and Wiscombe, a Southern California native, was especially influenced by the dramatically sculptured houses of John Lautner, who sometimes invited entire pools inside. Lautner`s robust designs drew the outside inside physically, not just through a picture window view.

Working in the same benign climate, Wiscombe wanted to completely blur interior and exterior, but not by hanging ferns from beams and creating a simple porch accessed through a row of French doors. “ I wanted a very lush, almost erotic development of nature inside,” he says. “It`s really about bringing the garden in, but not just abstractly.”

Wiscombe proposed turning the whole interior into an open, habitable landscape, with pivoting windows that run the lengths of the view facades. The architect adapted the structure so that its floor and roof dip and rise in topographic contours that invite lounging, climbing, picnicking and all the other activities common to more convention- al houses and yards. Natural light pours onto the interior landscape through windows set in interstices where roof forms slip past each other. A stream runs into the houses and into an interior pools before spilling over and resuming not sentimental: Unlike Lautner, Wiscombe brings no boulders inside.

The wedge-shape building lodges in the hillside and extends the downward slope in a fluid gesture, hovering over the land. Card drive under the skirt of the house to a side parking lot. “Driving was integrated into the form,” says Wiscombe.

Done several years ago, the design anticipates current, computer-assisted forms, including Wiscombe`s own P.S.1 winner, Light-Wing. “The desire of the computer is to create continuities out of disparate elements, to smooth out the differences. Although we worked the design out in a model, without a computer, the house flows. Our hands assumed the logic of the computer.”

Unlike the machines in the garden, offering one size that fits all sites and any occupant, Wiscombe`s design is Darwinian, encouraging adaptive architectural behaviour. The goal is to devise an open system, starting with the basic structural unit, that responds with sensitivity. The well-behaved structure is pliant rather than rigid. “The parts are mass-producible but not customized,” he says. “I want to get flexible, very liveable results out of something standard.” (less)

Virtually Perfect' (Paul Young), 2005
SURFACE
Tom Wiscombe – with his 3-D software, and his 500,000 frequent-flyer miles – are reinventing the way architects design buildings.

Tom Wiscombe can`t stop moving. For the better part of the pa (more) st 10 years, the 33-year-old-architect best known for his beach pavilion at New York`s P.S.1 has been travelling so much – nearly half-million miles per year to be exact – that he feels like he`s in a constant state of perpetual motion. “I figured it out,” he laughs. “Basically it means I`m travelling 833 miles per day, which means me body is constantly moving at 35 miles an hour.”

That sense of constant movement also defines his aesthetic. His recent design for the Akron Art Museum, which breaks ground this spring, employs a kind of wing shape that hovers over the existing space like a benevolent B-52. His concept for the Musèe des Confluences in Lyon, meanwhile, which also breaks ground early next year, resembles a crystalline cloud barely touching down to earth. “For that project, we tried to lift the museum off the ground and raise it up over a park,” he says. “It`s kind of like a flying body hovering over a natural space.” Movement defines his conceptual approach, too: “I`m interested in how different building elements – and different building systems – can feed off each other, and communicate with each other, to create new, emergent forms.”

To produce the “urban beach” pavilion at P.S.1 for instance, he made a virtual rendering of the outdoor space, complete with visitors, and attributed magnetic properties to the existing structures. Visitors, who were also assigned magnetic properties of their own, were then introduced through animation and 3d software, and the interaction between them and the interior walls eventually generated something akin to an architectural form. That in turn became the basis for his model. “It`s kind of like a swarm of bees moving through a space,” says Wiscombe, who named his firm, Emergent, after the same process. “A swarm has its own form that grows by adapting and responding to ever-changing conditions.”

Though he claims he`s not particularly interested in A.I., he says that he can envision a day when all the data of a particular space –such as potential volume, traffic, and usage- could be entered into a computer and the computer itself could generate forms – or a set of solutions – in response. “I can see my work starting to take that direction,” he admits, “ as buildings get more intelligent and building systems begin to communicate and feed back on one another.”

If the interest I advanced technologies is distinctly American – he was born in La Jolla, California, and educated at UCLA an U.C. Berkeley – be tempers that with a distinctly European sensibility. For much of the last decade, Wiscombe has split his time between practicing in the States and being the senior office designer for the architectural collective known as Coop Himmelb(l)au of Vienna. (That`s where he designed in UFA Cinema Center in Dresden in 1998 and is currently at work on a massive, $150 million BMW showroom outside Berlin). “America is much more about the bottom line,” he says. “It`s much more about functionality and using standard solutions and standard materials. In Europe, there`s a real craftsman culture, and I think that comes out of a culture that is generally more interested in architecture.”

As a result, he says, he has grown tired of the traditional model of the architect as the single author or creator, and now prefers a more communal approach. “I`m interceded in breaking down the subject, or the author, of the project,” he explains. “I don`t care for work that simply expresses the will of the designer – where the author forces his or her will on something, either by collaging shapes or using some traditional, `modern` methodology. I`m more interested in letting systems self-organized and synergize with one another to create things that are unexpected and organic. I think that`s where architecture – at least my architecture – is headed.”

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Spacecraft' (Julien Devereaux), 2005
Metropolis
Tom Wiscombe was born to build. "I was a Lego freak," he says. "It's kind of ridiculous, but I even had an architects' table when I was in the fifth grade." His enthusiasm for the craft of architectur (more) e is everywhere apparent in Light-Wing, the temporary pavilion that Emergent--Wiscombe's Los Angeles-based firm--designed and built in the courtyard of the P.S. 1 Center for Contemporary Art in Queens, New York. Hovering over the courtyard like an enormous aluminum dragonfly, Light-Wing provides shade, places to sit, and cooling pools of water for the throngs of music and art enthusiasts who attend Warm Up, the museum's raucous Saturday afternoon summer dance-party series. At night spotlights inside the roof structure make the cladding glow a bright pinkish red, and the dragonfly becomes a lightning bug, a beacon sure to entice any passers-by to the party.

For the last four years P.S. 1 and the Museum of Modern Art (the two are affiliated) have held a competition, the Young Architects Program, for the design of an "urban beach" setting for Warm Up. The program's objective is to identify and encourage emerging architectural talent, and in that it has been remarkably successful. Previous winners include Lindy Roy, William Massie, and SHoP/Sharples Holden Pasquarelli--whose wave-like wooden structure in 2000 largely put them on the map (and on the pages of Metropolis). As this year's winner, Wiscombe was awarded just $60,000 to build the project--and something much more valuable: a high-profile platform from which show off his work.

The Warm Up party aims to bring a new and younger audience to the P.S. 1 collection, and Light-Wing may prove a stronger draw than the music. It's an impressively massive and sturdy piece, and its undulating mesh surfaces are sure to send architectural theory fans into a swoon. But when Wiscombe talks about his project, he always comes back to the practical aspects of building. "The key for this project was the roof structure, obviously," he says. "It was generated first as a field of independent objects--long horizontal structures we're calling 'canoes.' The canoes are clad in aluminum mesh, and then there's a second cladding that goes over the entire thing." Wiscombe clearly relishes the challenge of making a coherent design out of these discrete objects, and not just because the resulting roof looks like "a mutant or hybrid landscape." "Each canoe is actually standing on its own columns," he says. "But they work together, too. You can start to remove some of the columns, because the canoes rely on one another for structural support. You can read this thing as a series of objects, but also as a larger organism."

Light-Wing is Emergent's first completed project. Until now most of Wiscombe's work has been with Vienna-based Coop Himmelb(l)au, where he is still a project partner. His output includes the radical 1998 UFA Cinema Palace, in Dresden, the yet-to-be-completed Akron Art Museum, in Ohio, and a science museum, in Lyon, France. Wiscombe, who is 33, first started working with Coop Himmelb(l)au upon completing his undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley. He had hoped to work at Frank Gehry's office, but no positions were open. Someone there suggested he try Coop Himmelb(l)au, which had a studio in Los Angeles at the time. While working there under founding partner Wolf Prix he finished a masters at UCLA's architecture school and launched Emergent in 1999.

Light-Wing was completed through a similarly serendipitous route: a mix of institutional risk-taking, informal networking, and the sort of non-hierarchical teamwork you might expect from a native Californian. (Wiscombe was born in La Jolla, near San Diego.) Wiscombe was nominated, along with Rogers Marvel Architects, by Metropolis senior editor Paul Makovsky for the Young Architects Program, which solicits nominations from curators, architects, critics, and editors every year. From that group, five finalists (including Rogers Marvel) were selected to present their designs to the jury. Terence Riley, architectural curator at MoMA and head of the Young Architects Program, says that Wiscombe's ability to convince the judging panel that he could do the work even though he was based in L.A. and Vienna was crucial. "He brought his frequent-flyer miles statement to the final presentation to show that it would not cost him any extra to be coming back and forth from Vienna and Los Angeles to New York," he says. "His presentation was very thorough and very well done." When he was selected, Wiscombe rounded up friends and student volunteers and entrusted the contract work to an old junior-high friend, Emergent project leader Burr Dodd, a gallerist, general contractor, and artist (his latest work involved projecting laser beams through fish tanks filled with honey). "We had a lot of people helping," Wiscombe says. In addition to his construction manager, welding team, project designer Dionicio Valdez, and two team leaders, Wiscombe employed about 20 interns: students from SCI-Arc (where he teaches) and others who had heard him lecture at Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and the University of Wisconsin. "It was all word of mouth, and it worked out pretty well," he says.

When something fell out of their range of expertise, the group looked close by to find help. Amsterdam Metalworks, for instance, the company that welded together the canoes and connected them to their columns, was a firm in the museum's Long Island City neighborhood that does architectural metal work for artists and galleries. The assembly took place under a freeway overpass a few blocks away from P.S. 1, with Dodd, Wiscombe, and interns taking shifts sleeping in a car in the lot to guard the aluminum from thieves. "It was really interesting for me to get a chance to play general contractor as well as architect," Wiscombe says. "It seems like a lot of younger architects are really coming back to the design/build idea. It's partly a reaction to the escape into the digital which has happened over the last ten years. We've all perfected our supple beautiful surfaces in Maya or whatever the software is, and now people want to get them realized."

Which is not to say that Wiscombe shuns the computer. "I do a lot of physical models," Wiscombe says. "That's the most important thing for me. But the computer was key and enabled us to build this thing." There were at least 5,000 differently shaped panels to be cut for the aluminum mesh cladding, and only by modeling them on a computer could Wiscombe's team cut them accurately and efficiently. "But I'm not interested in work that's completely computer auto-generated," he says, "because I think it loses its social aspect and the beauty of social dynamics. So I try to go back and forth."

"The thing I think is really interesting about Tom's project is that underlying all of his sophistication about how you build on an international scale--picked up from working with Coop Himmelb(l)au--is a profound understanding of the root activities that go into building," Riley says. Light-Wing reflects, both in its form and in the way Wiscombe and his team built it, a desire on the part of young architects for a craft as practical as it is theoretical, one that uses the computer as one tool among many rather than the sole way of looking at things. If it all seems very ad-hoc and casual, that's fine with Wiscombe. "For me this project is a model of how architects should be doing things." (less)

A Wade on the Wild Side' (Craig Kellogg), 2005
The New York Times
'IT'S 'The Matrix,' only it isn't black,'' said a woman in glasses with plastic zebra frames, sipping a cocktail Tuesday evening at a party for Light-Wing, the new outdoor installation at P.S. 1 Conte (more) mporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens. At sunset, colored spotlights went on and the metal mesh canopy began to shine like a flame-colored cloud.

The installation returns wading pools to P.S. 1 just in time for the summer heat. Since 2000, young designers have transformed its outdoor galleries into a summer playground. Alanna Heiss, the center's director, calls it ''an opportunity for a young designer to build for an international audience.'' Past participants were ROY, William E. Massie and SHoP/Sharples Holden Pasquarelli.

This year's choice, Tom Wiscombe, 33, often works for the Vienna-based architecture firm Coop Himmelblau and is best known for the design, with Wolf D. Prix, of the 1998 UFA Cinema Palace in Dresden. Mr. Wiscombe grew up on the beach in La Jolla, Calif., and says its tidal pools inspired the three long, shallow aluminum pools at P.S. 1. The knee-deep basins are set in his ''leisure landscape'' of plywood platforms, steps and benches engineered to support 7,000 people and waterproofed with porch paint. ''During the day it is a place to lay out in the sun,'' he said.

Shade is provided by a five-ton metal canopy wrapped with four layers of aluminum mesh held in place with plastic zip ties from the Home Depot. Mr. Wiscombe likens the canopy to a flock of birds overhead. (Maybe birds from a Hitchcock movie.) After dark, the lighting turns the courtyards into a disco. ''It is more a place to be than a thing to look at,'' said Terence Riley, the curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, who served on the selection committee.

The installation will be the setting for a series of musical events starting July 5 with the D.J. Richie Hawtin and continuing every Saturday through Aug. 30; the suggested donation is $6. The courtyard will open to the public on Sunday, rain or shine, along with the new summer exhibitions.

Wet weather this spring has been a particular challenge. When thunderstorms threatened to delay construction, volunteers worked in makeshift ponchos. ''Glad garbage bags were our standard uniform,'' Mr. Wiscombe said.

The aluminum and steel skeleton of the canopy was prefabricated in Long Island City by Amsterdam Metalworks. The finished design is credited to Emergent Architecture, a network of freelancers and technicians Mr. Wiscombe founded in 1999. ''Emergent is Tom,'' said Kai Hellat, 25, a Swiss designer who is one of seven members of the core group.

P.S. 1 and its co-sponsor, the Museum of Modern Art, provided a grant of $60,000 for construction, but to complete the project Mr. Wiscombe also accepted donations. Marjam, a Brooklyn lumberyard, gave $4,000 worth of plywood for the platform. DeSimone Consulting Engineers in Manhattan worked pro bono. Tuesday morning, more than 25 unpaid interns were on the site preparing for the party. The interns, from as far away as Southern California and Switzerland, have been sleeping in Burr Dodd's studio space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; Mr. Dodd is a contractor and childhood friend of Mr. Wiscombe's who recently joined Emergent and served as project leader at P.S. 1.

The installation, Mr. Dodd said, ''was just not possible on the budget we had without a lot of love.'' (less)

Wiscombe Wins MoMA/ P.S.1', 2005
Architectural Record

P.S. I Love you' (Sarah Gilbert), 2005
The New York Post

Duel in the Sun: Wiscombe vs. Niemayer' (Andrew Yang), 2005
ARTNews

Who is Tom Wiscombe?', 2005
RIBA Journal

EMERGENT (Beatrice Simonot), 2005
Experimental Architecture

A Beach Without a Sea', 2005
DOMUS

LightWing (Yukiko Hisatome), 2005
A+U

Temporary Queens' (Justin McGuirk), 2005
Building Magazine

EMERGENTs Organizational Chart' (Kevin Lerner), 2005
Architectural Record
To fully understand Tom Wiscombe’s web of collaborations, design partnerships, and overlapping firms, one needs to consult a flowchart. Conveniently, Wiscombe provides a sort of high-design Venn diagr (more) am near the front of his portfolio as a way of explaining the maze.

Wiscombe started his current career trajectory in 1992, when he graduated with a B.Arch. from the University of California, Berkeley, and more or less stumbled into a job at the Los Angeles office of Coop Himmelb(l)au.

“They paid me almost nothing,” Wiscombe said. “I remember surviving on ramen noodles and driving an ex–cop car I picked up at a police auction.” But he rose quickly, and Wolf Prix gave him the opportunity to be the project designer in a competition for the UFA Cinema Center in Dresden, Germany. Coop Himmelb(l)au won the competition, and Wiscombe was given the position of senior designer in the firm’s offices in Vienna, Austria, while he worked on the project.

In 1998, Wiscombe returned to the U.S. to study for his M.Arch. at the University of California, Los Angeles. “I needed the degree anyway, to eventually get licensed and teach,” Wiscombe said, “but for me, the more important thing was to cut the umbilical cord to the office and get into a mental space where I could begin to define my own work.”

It was after Wiscombe’s graduation from UCLA in 1999 that his professional associations became tangled. To this day, for instance, he continues to work with Coop Himmelb(l)au on a project-by-project basis. When this cooperative is in effect, it goes by the name LA LAB and can involve not only the Vienna firm and Wiscombe, but also members of Emergent, which is a sort of hub organization that connects all of Wiscombe’s various projects.

“Emergent is a kind of opportunistic arrangement,” Wiscombe said, “like a cellular slime mold, which is sometimes a single organism, sometimes spread out as multiple organisms, depending on environmental conditions.” For Emergent, those conditions are mainly economic, and the firm grows and shrinks accordingly, filling up with associate architects and interns, when projects require them.

In addition to LA LAB and Emergent, Wiscombe also collaborates with the architect Kurt Sattler, in a partnership that they call General Dynamics*. Plus, Wiscombe teaches at both the Southern California Institute of Architecture and UCLA.

Wiscombe’s father is a scientist for NASA, and the architect attributes his love for materialist philosophy to his dad’s atmospheric research. This interest in materialism has led to an insistence on working almost entirely with physical models. According to Wiscombe, models are what enable a materialistic architecture. “At least until truly interactive holographic computer interfaces are available,” he said, “models are the most interactive and fastest way of working.”

With Wiscombe’s many commitments, fast is important, and so is flexible, and his business structure mirrors his design philosophy. “I think architecture has a lot to learn from the worlds of business and biology,” he says, “where organizations are in constant flux and have to negotiate new deals or territories to survive. The building industry—and, for that matter, building uses and owners—is changing incredibly fast, and it is systems and organizations that endure, not places, entries, types, or facades.”

If it is in fact systems and organizations that endure, then Emergent—with its slime-moldlike ability to adapt to constantly changing conditions—has a bright future. (less)

EMERGENT (Beatrice Simonot), 2005
FutureHouse

Haptic Morphology' (Lebbeus Woods), 2005
Borderlines