Spotlight Series | Architect Thom Faulders
I recently sat down with architect Thom Faulders to discuss his work and remarkable career. With his amicable smile and naturally pedagogic demeanor, Thom opened the conversation with pointed advice to entrepreneurial architects: when you’re starting out, speak with a royal we. After obtaining licensure Thom started “Beige Design.” Of the name, Thom says:
(TF) “Beige Design,” like most people do when they’re starting off, was kind of an umbrella where nobody knows whether it’s 400 people or just one person. A smart thing to do if you’re just starting. The name started off in an ironic vein where beige was almost a derogatory term…which I liked! Beige was considered ugly, or dull.
Later in the conversation I would come to realize that the initial spark of irony in the name was never abandoned even after Beige Design played out its role and the more direct name, “Faulders Studio,” came to replace it.
Examining Faulders’ early works one can see a trajectory that in many ways paralleled the popular modes of production of the time. Soft City for example, is a series of concept sketches from 1989 done with oil pastels, which have been acquired by the SFMOMA. Speaking about the drawings, Thom reflects on the role of the experimental drawings and the importance of concept drawings. Soft City was to him a lesson in “formally distorted buildings without the surrealist narrative.”
Soft City (1989), Oil Pastel drawings acquired by he SFMOMA in 2001.
But as most architects face the inevitable crisis of being in the realm of representation vs. the thing itself, so did Faulders.
(TF) As one era was ending and a new one was starting I found myself navigating that line between the two realms [representation and the thing itself]. And at some point I wanted to stop spending all my time in the realm of representation and get more directly involved with the thing we’re trying to create.
And the thing to create was remarkably tectonic. With projects like Undercover Table (1999) and Bachelor Pad (1998), Faulders boldly moved into the tactile.
Undercover Table (1999), another project in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Bachelor Pad (1998)
Museum House (1997)
But, just as the 20th century, with its overarching Modernist hegemony, was nearing an end, so was our conversation shifting to more contemporary issues. From beginning with understanding the role of the drawing to then working within the stringent Modernist canon, we then moved on to discuss the 21st century. Speaking candidly, Thom quipped,
(TF) I started looking at the irregular as opposed to the distinctly perfect. At the awkward, the not quiet right, the unfinished, the deformed…which were openings to new investigations. But even though I was interested in the aspect of the imperfect, we still worked with precision. There’s a bit of bullshit in that argument because I’m still interested in that “completeness.” In the end, it’s not Art Povera, or the found object. It’s definitely about the precision of making something.
It was at this point that I made the connection to the earlier reference to “Beige.” That sense of the “not quiet white…” became clearer. Faulders was rebelling against the Modernists whitewash all along! Imperfections create openings that lead to new possibilities; even if unintentional in nature, they certainly can be intentionally perfected.
Of the possibilities found in that seam of imperfection, Deformscape (2008) is perhaps a case in point.
(TF)I wanted something fixed but ongoing. Something that would continue to be perceived as different. I’m interested in one’s perceptual and dynamic relationship with a fixed thing.
Deformscape (2008)
What one notices in this project, other than Faulders’ relationship with the viewer/user, is the pragmatic move into computer-aided design with the pronounced purpose of generating a specific pattern with digital output systems.
But when I asked Faulders about his relationship to parametrics and scripting, he remained resistant to the intrigue of the purely virtual.
(TF) Computers remain a generative tool. I’m not fascinated with technology so much as to what technology allows for. We need to get this thing to work [Deformscape], and we need it in a language that is measurable because we know it’s going to be outputted and that we’re going to put it together in a specific way.
Yet, much like any “generative tool,” at some point the representational aspect of it enamors us. Whether it’s the early perspectival projections, or Piranesi’s impossible Carceris, beautiful drawings have a hold on us.
Similarly, the generative tools have allowed Faulders to create projects like GEOtube and the Byophyte Building. As it stands today, these two examples exist on the speculative level. Working with modern software has allowed for these projects to have expedited tests with different iterations to finally offer us beautiful representations of unattainable worlds.
GEOtube (2009), “Vertical Salt Deposit Growth System,” a proposal for the city of Dubai.
A quick glance at Thom Faulders’ career and one notices the varied scales with which he works. When I asked him about that specifically (from the scale of drawings to industrial design to the larger installations and buildings), Thom’s preoccupation with the user was made all the more apparent.
(TF) I’m still struggling with the same conundrum. How we can actually capture a diagram of movement and create it. Does it have to look like a vectoral flow, or can it actually function that way? Whether it’s a salad bowl or a building, I’m still struggling with the same conundrum.
In 2001, Faulders mounted an installation at the SFMOMA titled “Particle Reflex.” When our conversation steered us to that project, Thom’s answers, were again, candid and reflective. Describing his attempt at capturing that “zero point”,
(TF) Particle Reflex was in between potential energy and dynamic energy. It was an opportunity to experiment on how to construct a movable entity. We sort of obtained that end result, and in many ways didn’t…The project was an attempt to think in terms of the performance of branching that’s based on flexible fibers as opposed to hinging. As it turns out, this project was more of a combination of both methods because we had flexible columns (the bungee chord strands) and a series of rigid panels fastened with rubberized pieces. It was able to hold it’s shape, and not! It was in that in-between state. And if I could be more critical of this piece, after construction, its designed redundancies, which allow for its flexibility, also became the thing that gave it its rigidity.
Particle Reflex (2001)
Constantly engaged in figuring out the users relationship with the constructed space, and much like his experiment with Particle Reflex, Mute Room (2001) “literally comes alive with the presence of occupants. Memory foam acts as a kind of blank slate. It’s slow acting and can hold it’s deformation for up to a minute, occupants became active in the making of the space.” “It’s got this amoebic level of intelligence,” joked Thom.
Mute Room (2001), part of the Rooms for Listening exhibition at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco.
Within the same thread of engagement, BAMscape, an ongoing installation at the Berkeley Art Museum, creates an “operating system” that the users then interact with.
(TF) BAMscape is a 3-dimensional field. But the project is less about a unique geometry and more about a field of irregular geometries that allow for any number of possibilities. Ones that we don’t know, and ones we have no interest in controlling…All we did was design an operating system and occupants come there and figured out what to do with it. Just as we do with any operating system, we don’t tell people what to do with it.
BAMscape (2010)
Ames Spot (2009), on the other hand, turns the user into the object of manipulation instead of the subject in control. The project served a dual purpose of being a design project as well as a documentary project. Building on his research into Adelbert Ames’ distortion room, Faulders was able to create a tool that could “transform the user in real time.”
(TF) We figured out how to make a distortion room so that from a particular point of view, a user could actually transform.
Ames Spot (2009), views of the installation from the outside.
Ames Spot (2009), photographs taken from inside showing the uncanny distorting visual effect.
Finally, making a full circle, the conversation led us back into the realm of the “representation” in the form of a recent project, “RAYdike,” which was one of six winners of the Rising Tides competition in 2009.
(TF) We wanted to make information more convincing. There’s been so much information about rising tides that it almost becomes unconvincing and bland. The question becomes, what does that have to do with my life? But if we put it back in terms of its visceral quality, how I navigate my city on a day to day basis, taking the information out of the realm of representation and turning it into a more “concrete” project (in the sense that it’s existing in full scale at the urban level) involves the user with the information…In many ways it’s a full scale drawing upon the city itself.
RAYdike (2009), images and map for the winning competition entry.
Irrespective of whether or not the tides do reach that level, the important realization made through this project was that a virtual condition could, and most certainly does have an impact on the actual state.
(TF) We can be affected by it even if it’s “not real.” It is a call to action, it is functional. It’s amazing how real the effects of a virtual wall are. We live in a wonderfully digital world and it extends our minds; it has a real effect on our existence. It has also allowed us to see our urban environment through a simulacrum. That allows us to redefine “the city.”
Faulders undoubtedly has his finger on the pulse; and just as he said to me when we first sat down, architecture needs to always be fed from outside its realm. Whether it’s technology, the latest scientific discovery, novel artistic endeavors or new social trends Thom knows exactly where the pulse’s next adrenaline rush is coming from.
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