Jason Payne
Biographical interview
SUMMARY
In this interview, Jason Payne traced his architectural education and subsequent role in the digital turn. After beginning in landscape architecture at Cal Poly, he transferred to SCI-Arc, where he engaged with Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and complexity theory. He explained how the 1992 Los Angeles riots and courses with Mike Davis deepened his understanding of architecture’s social and urban contexts.
Payne later entered Columbia’s inaugural “paperless studio” as the school shifted from hand drafting to digital production. Studying with Jesse Reiser, Stan Allen, and Greg Lynn, he explored animation software and particle simulators to model dynamic systems and consider how diagrams might move and generate form. He subsequently worked at Reiser + Umemoto on the Yokohama Port Terminal and briefly with Daniel Libeskind. At RPI and Pratt, his teaching emphasized material behavior and translation between analogue and digital models. In the 2000s, he joined UCLA’s faculty in an environment shaped by Sylvia Lavin, Greg Lynn, and Robert Somol. Payne reflected on divisions among faculty and students over competing approaches to architectural design.
Payne later entered Columbia’s inaugural “paperless studio” as the school shifted from hand drafting to digital production. Studying with Jesse Reiser, Stan Allen, and Greg Lynn, he explored animation software and particle simulators to model dynamic systems and consider how diagrams might move and generate form. He subsequently worked at Reiser + Umemoto on the Yokohama Port Terminal and briefly with Daniel Libeskind. At RPI and Pratt, his teaching emphasized material behavior and translation between analogue and digital models. In the 2000s, he joined UCLA’s faculty in an environment shaped by Sylvia Lavin, Greg Lynn, and Robert Somol. Payne reflected on divisions among faculty and students over competing approaches to architectural design.
BIOGRAPHY
Payne is principal of Hirsuta. Committed to the synthesis of scholarship and practice, Payne ranks among the most influential designers and educators in his generation. 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.
CATALOGUE
INDEX
No tags assigned to this post.