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The Warp and Weft of Oyler Wu Faculty Profile Dora Epstein Jones
Dora Epstein Jones is a theorist and teacher of architectural culture. Her work mainly focuses on the discipline of architecture, and includes interrogations on the discipline’s boundaries and operations through examinations of tectonics, practice and pedagogy, as well as (generally external) concerns such as gender, sex, mobility and criticality. She has published in Arch’it, ArcCa and other architectural journals, as well as written essays for publications by Office dA, UCLA Architecture and anthologies on gender and sex in architecture. Dr. Jones is a long-time collaborator with Jones, Partners: Architecture, and the former coordinator of Cultural Studies at SCI-Arc. Dr. Jones has been a professor at SCI-Arc for over 8 years and has taught many of the courses in the core undergraduate and graduate curricula. Jones holds a doctorate in Architecture and Urban Design and a Master in Urban Planning, both from UCLA. Dwayne Oyler currently heads the Undergraduate Thesis Design Studio at SCI-Arc. In 2000, Oyler, along with Jenny Wu, established the office of Oyler Wu Collaborative. He has also worked in the office of Toshiko Mori Architect, and collaborated with Lebbeus Woods on numerous projects. Previously, Oyler taught at the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture in Vico Morcote, Switzerland, and in the Thesis Design Studio program at Cooper Union in New York City. He was awarded the SOM Prize and Travel Fellowship for Architecture, Design and Urban Design in 1996. Oyler received a Bachelor of Architecture from Kansas State University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Jenny Wu currently teaches first year design studio at SCI-Arc. Prior to establishing Oyler Wu Collaborative, she was a project architect at various offices, including Architecture Research Office and Gluckman Mayner Architects in New York. From 2001 to 2002, Wu taught design studios at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She was awarded the Clifford Wong Prize in Housing Design while at Harvard and was a SOM Prize and Travel Fellowship finalist in 2001.
On any given day, this last summer, and the summer before, at the north end of the SCI-Arc parking lot, where the heat intensifies and swirls, you could see them both, in coveralls and work gloves, building the Graduation Pavilion. And, on any given fall day, during studio time, or seminar time, they are there too—one in a crisp cotton shirt and pressed suit; the other a knockout with beautifullypainted nails. It’s hard to believe they are the same people. But, this is Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, the husbandand-wife team behind the Oyler Wu Collaborative. And this is precisely what they do. As architects, they are also practitioners, educators, fabricators and builders. After having received their M.Arch degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, they came to California where they have focused on two main scales of building: small-scale installations which they design and fabricate themselves, and large-scale projects in Asia and the United States. They draw, they weld, they design and they teach—and they work easily across this spectrum. Together they began their firm, the Oyler Wu Collaborative, in 2004. If the name sounds more like a jazz ensemble than an architectural firm, it befits a sensibility of experimental fusion that has lived happily in music for almost a century. And, like music, this collaborative fusion extends beyond the roles they play and into the work itself. They are widely recognized for their “experimental work,” and it is precisely this attitude of fusion that has brought their work to the Beijing Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the London Festival of Architecture. The studios they lead range from the very hands-on 1A “design/build” studio to the more theoretical and analytical Undergraduate Thesis, while their seminars may range from graduate-level delineation and drawing to a broad survey of culture and change in China. Dwayne Oyler also co-led the building effort for the SCI-Arc/Caltech entry into the 2011 Solar Decathlon, once again marking a unique versatility for this firm. Despite the confusion that fusion and versatility might entail, Oyler Wu has a very strong design sensibility. They invent and elaborate basic material conditions into what may be termed “fusion tectonics” or to be more descriptive, weaving. In weaving, two or more sets of threads are interlaced; the warp threads are those that would be held in the loom at parallel lines, while the weft is shuttled through the warp (or heddle) on a pick. While most weaves are interlaced at right angles due to the construction of most looms, the fact is that both sets of threads are tectonically flexible. The warp threads might float, as in a silk weave, the weft may be made up of many different thicknesses and types and thread as in artisanal weaving, the battening may be very tight or very loose. Weaving therefore has an endless set of effects possible. The only ordination is that, once woven, the threads form a piece of cloth that no longer need the loom to remain whole. At SCI-Arc, this sensibility has been demonstrated by two projects: Live Wire and Netscape. Live Wire, their installation for the SCI-Arc Gallery, was essentially a stair composed of metal mesh and tubing that connected the floor of the gallery to the catwalk above. A straightforward approach to the assembly would prove the mesh in need of stiffening and the tubing in need of bracing. Their assembly, however, used the two components in mutual support of each other. The geometry of the tubing, welded together, provided vertical and lateral support, while also reinforcing the outline for the mesh. Live Wire was not simply a stair—it was a continuous assembly of structure, handrail, tread, riser, and stringer in a single symphonic burst. Netscape, the Graduation Pavilion, is more explicitly a weave. Using a technique from knitting, a double-layered net made from 45,000 linear feet of rope stretches between a truss composed of metal tubing. Because the knit rope is not fixed at the intersec2
tions, like a conventional net, it is able to provide tension between the metal members at contorted angles usually associated with the stretch and pull of a knit sweater. Pieces of fabric were inserted between the two layers of knitted net to provide additional shade and to further create a fluid and billowing visual effect. The result is a dynamic pavilion—one engineered using feedback from the net and its contortions to the three-dimensionality of the tubing structure. While there is a visible truss, it is not the only way in which Netscape holds itself up. The truss is merely a set of points at which the load accumulates, and chooses the ground as a place to set. Netscape hovers. The fluidity of the tectonics in the SCI-Arc installations is almost never in service of the delight of weaving in its own right. Instead, it serves as a way of countering the typically straightforward and singular considerations of function. Just as the tectonics of the materiality are not self-possessed, form is an elaboration and excess derived from a multiple field of functional considerations. A triangular vector of mesh appears as wings, but it is counter-balancing the arm of the riser, while it is also filtering light from the
For Oyler Wu, the analogy of “weaving” instead emphasizes a fluidity, not just between functional aspects, but as a correction to this ontological stockade. unshaded window. A knot in the knitting appears as a moment of tectonic weight in an otherwise continuous field, creating a visual spatial depth, but it is also providing structural compression, while tying up the loose ends of the knit. For Oyler Wu, “weaving” perhaps suggests a more antiessentialist view of technology. An essentialist view of technology, according to Andrew Feenberg, has led us into believing that technology is foreign to human nature. It is characterized as cold, rational, and often possessed of its own imperatives beyond human processes. Humans therefore encounter technology as merely “functions and raw materials” and hence, create goal-oriented practices aimed towards efficiency. The essentialist view reduces technology into actors and outcomes, materials and output in a manner that can only be described as a form of social pathology. For Oyler Wu, the analogy of “weaving” instead emphasizes a fluidity, not just between many functional aspects, but also as a correction to this ontological stockade. Through weaving, both as the fabrication method and as the main visual device, the experience of the technical is inextricably tied to the practice of the technical. This intertwining is also indicated by the way in which Oyler Wu use drawing and modeling. Typically, drawing is imagined as the predecessor to built work—the drawing literally and figuratively draws out the idea into formal and aesthetic presence prior to the development, or as a first step towards the development, of a design. For Oyler Wu, in their painstakingly analog form of pen-and-ink drawings, the sense of direct ancestry is lost. Instead, the drawings feel more like science-fictionalized instantiations of moments or moods—dense fields of straight lines producing skincell ovoids, balls of twine looping infinitely into deep space. The drawings could be studies, or they could be derivations. They are