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MATERIAL ECOLOGY

Hernán Díaz Alonso often wears head-to-toe black, sunglasses and a skull ring and bracelet thrown in for effect. “I’m not that guy who’s thinking in theoretical mani-festos,” says the Argentina-born designer, who entered the spotlight in 2005 for winning the annual Young Architects Program at PS1. “It’s more like a jam session,” he adds. The principal of LA’s Xefirotarch, Díaz Alonso is as much an architect as a fantasist, a spatial auteur and a virtuoso of the grotesque. Like synthetic parasites or tumorous growths, his designs ooze and writhe in bulging masses and lashing ten-drils, creating futurescapes worthy of a shadowy sci-fi flick. Consider his pedestrian bridge for San Juan, Puerto Rico, which will wrap around a freeway like an alien. Or last year’s Pitch Black installation at Vienna’s MAK, whose wiry “spiders” over-ran the museum.

Born in Buenos Aires and raised in Rosario, his early aspirations were cin-ematic. “I was always interested in sci-fi, the idea of possible futures, as well as the aesthetic.” Evoking HR Giger, he says, “My architecture has something to do with making science fiction a reality.” After coming to the US in ’98 to study at Colum-bia, Alonso moved to LA in 2001 and founded his firm—the name a reference to Foucault’s Pendulum.

In addition to teaching at Columbia and SCI-Arc, Díaz Alonso is in the midst of an installation at Paris’ Centre Pompidou, a project for Vienna’s Thyssen- Bornemisza art foundation plus films and video games—follow-ups to his 2006 animated city-of-the-future concept for the History Channel. “As an architect, you’re working in front of a monitor so you have a cinematic relationship with the design process anyway,” he says. “With architecture, images and compositions can com-bine to create more of an atmosphere.” And that’s no science fiction. xefirotarch.com Aric chen

XEFIROTARCH

The Massachusetts-stationed, Israeli-born Oxman, an Architectural Association grad and former med student, combines her scholarly studies—in everything from engineering and medicine to architecture and computer science—to create works that transcend categorization. At MIT Oxman founded Materialecology in 2006, a research lab devoted to conjuring biologically inspired structures. Her Natural Artifice studies, for example, explored how elements found in nature could benefit artificial ones in architecture. The experiments were included in MoMA’s 2008 “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit and were acquired for the museum’s permanent collection.

Oxman is turning her safety goggles to larger-scale projects, too. “Furniture is, in a sense, small-scale architecture,” she says. Her 2008 prototype, the Beast chaise, was fabricated according to the distribution of weight in her body, using varying polymers for different areas of pressure. It’s stiffer in the legs for sup-port and softer for the head and rear. For Boston’s Museum of Science, Oxman is applying the Beast’s principles to a glove-like arm splint. Next up? “I saw a woman carrying a cello,” Neri says, “and I imagined how to redesign it using my theoretical guidelines.” Enough said. materialecology.com Liz ArnoLd

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AMERICAN BUILT: (Top to bottom,

left to right) Oxman’s Beast chaise

prototype (2008); Scientist Neri

Oxman; A material study called

Raycounting, part of MoMA’s “Design

for the Elastic Mind” exhibition; A

2006 installation at the Art Hotel in

the Dominican Republic; A competition

entry for the Tabakalera New Media

Art Museum (2008) in San Sebastian,

Spain; Architect Hernán Díaz Alonso