GO FIGURE

WW’s design strategy focuses on what we call the systemic figure. Historically, architecture has aimed at two seemingly exclusive ambitions: figural definition and abstract neutrality. The first invokes a series of determined outcomes (programmatic, formal and technical), while the second aspires to architectural indeterminacy. The architecture of WW begins with the notion that this binary is specious at best. WW’s systemic figures form spaces, catalyze programmatic relationships, and organize technologies within a single system that integrates formal exactitude and informal potential.

Our projects are designed as synthetic totalities (systems) that thrive on susceptibilities (openness). Acknowledging that architecture traffics in degrees of legibility, our interest lies in knowing when to define and when to relinquish definition so as to trigger new possibilities for architecture and urbanism. The systemic figure generates precise, yet proliferate programmatic relationships, all the while proffering a single, figural identity for a project.

The five projects exhibited here document the evolution of the systemic figure as a design strategy within our office. In the IntraCenter, the first project where we adopted this approach, we designed a system of spatial brackets — what we termed “parentheses.” Individually, each bracket forms a parenthesis with another bracket, partially enclosing a volume of space. Each bracket can be paired with several opposing brackets, thereby creating nested, overlapping, open figures (parentheses) that enclose one or many programs, depending on the specifics of form and program. Aggregated, the parentheses constitute a systemic figure that puts form and program into a perpetually oscillating relationship.

In the San Jose State University Museum of Art and Design, four overlapping loops constitute the overall system. These loops, which stem from while also imposing upon site and functional spatial requirements, are the programmatic, technical, and formal catalysts for each of the project’s four floors. The loops are both telling and promissory: individually and in concert with one another they define and connect the museum’s spaces, thereby producing a series of lapping, looping and layering programmatic and spatial relationships in the museum. In this project, we came to understand the importance of seeing these lines as a superstructure that necessarily includes a feedback component; they became a set of Darwinian regulating lines whose constant evolution refines and accelerates their potential. As the project design has evolved, so has its systemic figure. Originally, each loop was a continuous line; in recent iterations (shown, for example, in the green diagram of the ground floor loop) that line has been segmented, offset, stretched and multiplied so as to optimize programmatic, formal and technical possibilities.

WW is unabashed in the belief that design matters and that the production of architecture is an act of profound optimism. Nowhere is this more important than in public buildings, and at no time has it been more important than it is right now. Go Figure.