Building his own creature feature

HernAn DIAZ ALONSO is puffing away on a Bolivar cigar, tossing off terms like “augmentation,” “gender” and “affect.” These aren’t words architects generally use, but with his Argentine accent, his mop of black hair, his Salvador Dali mustache and his Don Quixote goatee -- and the blue fumes -- the vaguely romantic lexicon seems right. After all, he is describing a “creature,” an otherworldly, snaking Styrofoam-urethane-spandex-aluminum structure, the winning entry in the MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program that he’s installing in P.S. 1’s Long Island City courtyard.

When it opens, on June 30, people will navigate the undulating red and white “Sur,” as Diaz Alonso calls the project, as though picking their way through the insides of an extraterrestrial monster. The skeletal remains look as if the alien got wedged in a passageway and died trying to worm its way out, bones left behind, stranded and bleached in Queens.

“My work is about the beauty of the grotesque,” Diaz Alonso says, seated at his immaculate, clutter-free desk in the downtown Los Angeles studios of Xefirotarch, the firm he founded in 1999. Next to the desk, on top of a small side table, are an Alvar Aalto ashtray and eight black glasses cases, “an extravagance, an obsession,” Diaz Alonso shamelessly confesses.

“Hernan’s piece is from outer space,” says Tony Guerrero, director of exhibitions at P.S. 1. Which should come as no surprise, since Diaz Alonso teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where experimentation is the watchword.

The Queens program, begun in 1999, urges architects to take risks, to hang their toes over the edge of the surfboard and offer a vision for an “urban beach,” an oasis for those who don’t have a beach to visit in summer. Past winners -- like last year’s Canopy, by nARCHITECTS, which was built primarily of freshly cut green bamboo -- were made of common materials and constructed by conventional means.

“Usually we dive in, we put people into it, and we help produce it,” Guerrero says. “On this one, we took the back seat and enjoyed the ride.”

Diaz Alonso, who names all his pieces after songs, chose the Anibal Troilo title “Sur” because he felt it was time to pick a tango. The song evokes excess, sensuality, rhythm and voluptuousness, which attributes to the space beneath the 6,000 square feet of spandex canopies -- “giant condoms,” he calls them -- stretched over 1,058 aluminum struts.

Forms born of software

Like earlier works by Xefirotarch (a name that has no meaning and no correct pronunciation), “Sur” is a compilation of single-cell forms, conceived on a computer screen, then twisted and racked using Maya visual effects animation software -- another obsession, born of Diaz Alonso’s early ambition to make movies. Unlike most architects, who are sketchers and model-makers, Diaz Alonso, 35, is part of an emerging generation of architects whose work begins -- and, some critics say, ends -- in the computer. For him, the rules are encoded in the software.

There is “a high degree of differentiation,” he explains as a series of articulated pieces of “Sur” flashes by on his screen. Each image reveals a weird, rib-like segment of a progression, 3-D geometry in motion. The P.S. 1 project originated with a four-headed cell, an elongated cloverleaf, and emerged a recombinant mutant that sci-fi mastermind H.P. Lovecraft might have dreamed up.

At P.S. 1, Xefirotarch is aiming for a cinematic quality. The single space of the courtyard is broken into multiple spaces, and only by moving through the sequence can any meaning be found. The totally uniform urethane base -- which is sprayed onto the Styrofoam like aerosol paint -- is such an undifferentiated surface that it reinforces the need to keep moving. What is it that lies ahead? More of the same, only slightly different, like the smooth bed of a marble canyon. In fact, the architects pushed their creation to see how much of the space it could occupy, so the unfolding would last that much longer.

Diaz Alonso likens the project to watching a film in which frames have little individual value but together add up. This sense that a work is evolving, he says, comes from the late Spanish architect Enric Miralles, who taught him the power of reiteration -- repeating themes that gain power with slight variations.

“It puts people into an uncomfortable relationship to the object,” Diaz Alonso says of the finished installation. “You do not know the whole creature at first. You can only view it -- read it -- in parts. You have to start to build the whole in your mind. The unknown becomes known. This introduces the element of horror, which is more horrible if you don’t know it all at once in your mind.”

Xefirotarch, like the architecture firm Greg Lynn Form, in Venice, Calif., is following the pioneering ‘60s and ‘70s work of Peter Eisenman, who rejected Walter Gropius’ Modernist dictum that form follows function. The idea, vastly simplified, is that architecture can flow directly from the rules of drawing rather than from the needs of, say, a hospital, an office building, an airport terminal -- an approach Diaz Alonso gleaned firsthand during a two-year stint in Eisenman’s New York office.

“We don’t draw anything in this office. We are totally paperless. If we want a pen, we say, ‘Where is the pen?’ ” Little wonder that his screen saver displays an armada of sentinel squids drilling demonically toward Zion, from the film “Matrix Revolutions.”

Greg Lynn, who teaches architecture at UCLA and still draws freehand, says that Diaz Alonso uses the computer as “a creative medium. Most designers use them mechanically. Hernan’s work is one of the first not justifying designs by saying ‘This is the way the computer did it.’ Hernan says, ‘I’m interested in the grotesque,’ and he uses the computer to achieve it.” Or as Diaz Alonso told SCI-Arc director Eric Owen Moss, “What you do is ask the computer what it can do for you; I ask the computer what I can do for it.”

Intuitive design

Each mutated form in “Sur” -- which consists of the composite Styrofoam and urethane floor and the cantilevered spandex canopies -- can be traced to the original form Diaz Alonso coaxed to life through visual effects. Every form in the piece shares the same number of points and the same number of curves, as if they’d all spun off the same strand of DNA. And while the computer logarithms projected “incredible variation,” the basic geometry was determined by Diaz Alonso.

“You are the designer,” he says. “There is clear intentionality, clear sensibility and clear intuition. It’s a very focused exploration to expand unpredictability.” As in jazz, there is a precise beginning but an undetermined end. Working at the computer, “you educate your body the way a musician educates his fingers,” Diaz Alonso says.

And where do the forms come from? “I can’t tell you,” he says. “It is like trying to define to somebody why you are in love. There may be something rational, but the deep essence of it is mysterious.”

Until now, Xefirotarch’s designs -- for bus stops in New York; a city plaza in Lexington, Ky.; a multipurpose arena in Busan, South Korea; U2 Tower in Dublin -- remained on CD-ROM. The $60,000 P.S.1 budget is paying for “Sur” to actually be built.

“I wouldn’t call it a building,” Diaz Alonso announces. “It’s more a laboratory for ideas.” The unifying idea is what he calls “affect, the choreography of ambience, the management of desire.” “Sur” is meant to spark an emotional journey. “Hopefully, we are producing something unpredictable. The truth is that everybody will react differently, each in their own way. For some it will be horrific. Others might laugh. Some might feel it’s a cartoon -- and something about it is cartoonish.”

Moss has another word for the work: aspirational. “I think Hernan may have the potential to separate himself over a period of time and actually find a way to say things differently, or to say old things in a new way or new things in an old way. What he knows least is the relationship between space and materials and assembly. His work is very ethereal -- which, paradoxically, makes it very dense and incredibly light. It’ll fly up to Jupiter, except it will fall down to Earth. In other words, for all its complexity, it is incredibly homogenous. The work is appealing in terms of innovation. Yet it sometimes feels a bit disingenuous. Somewhere between the zippity-doo-dah and the magic might be the right quotient.”

As Terence Riley, MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design and one of the P.S. 1 judges, said expectantly, “We are going into a whole new territory here with Hernan.”