DEATH OF THE DIGITAL OFFICE

Words  ::  Stephen Phillips   //  Images  ::  Herwig Baumgartner and Scott Uriu

“The purely digital office is over” declares Herwig Baumgartner and Scott Uriu of B+U in my recent interview conducted at their Los Angeles architecture office. Baumgartner and Uriu began working together nine years ago in an effort to launch what is now proving a new trajectory for the post-digital design era. Computer animation technology had an enormous impact on architecture and the design profession since the late 1980s, but as Baumgartner and Uriu see it, “this purely digital romance” has faded. “The purely digital office reminds us of the purely digital studio in music which was huge in the 1970s; everyone threw-out their analog equipment and then sure enough ten years later all that stuff came back in,” Baumgartner recalls. “The all digital sound was too dry, and then they tried to create effect machines to make it sound warmer; in the end people began just to use the analog and digital in combination with each other,” he concludes. Baumgartner and Uriu are among many young architecture firms that are working towards a new trend in contemporary design—to combine a wide variety of analog and digital media together in their practice.
Baumgartner and Uriu began their partnership with mutual fascination for electronic music. Their original research for “Sound City”--an urban development project for Broadway Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles, explored the use of sound as an urban and architectural design tool. Their concept for the 12 city block redevelopment study took shape in response to their investigation of urban sound wave patterns. Working alongside MIT engineer Steven Klein, Baumgartner and Uriu created “Soundplot” software that diagramed ambient sound throughout the given environment. The software translated that sound into an array of continuous wave patterned surfaces that Baumgartner and Uriu used to generate form. Instead of just simply deploying the resultant surfaces to generate idealized “sound forms” however, they eventually began to examine the resultant vector wave patterns in order to generate unique building structures. In their canopy design for an urban lounge and café on Mateo Street in the artist district of downtown Los Angeles for example, they created a structure designed in response to local sound conditions. The shape of the canopy created a comparatively unique pattern associated with the sound generated at this particular site. Clad with video projection screen surfaces amidst an array of mini-speakers—this unique event structure could be used to set varied moods and lively ephemeral conditions.
Very familiar designing cultural venues at both small and large scale, Baumgartner and Uriu have extrapolated their sound wave studies to much larger venues. Baumgartner formerly a senior associate and project architect at Gehry Partners has over 10 years experience working on complex performance centers such as the Experience Music Project in Seattle, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, and the CalArts Theater in Los Angeles. Uriu also formerly of the Gehry office, worked on the Experience Music Project in Seattle, in addition to the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in the Millennium Park, Chicago. Their work together at B+U now combines their mutual talents and experience which can be seen in a progression of projects from “Soundcloud”--the urban lounge and café on Mateo Street, to their most recent competition entry for a Performing Arts Center in Taipei. Baumgartner and Uriu’s sinuous synaesthetic designs build upon a clear strategy to enliven urban social conditions through a series of complex and continuous curvilinear surfaces that engage the movements of varying crowds if not swarms of people. Their projects motivate viewer interaction through a tantalizing array of optic and haptic spatial techniques that encourage spectators to move about in endless musical rhythm.
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