Random Acts of Architecture

Professional and personal partners, Ogrydziak and Prillinger met during architecture school at Princeton University, where their professors included the theoreticians Peter Eisenman, Anthony Vidler, and Mark Wigley. “Everybody was interested in psychoanalysis, and there was a lot of talk about how to release the repressed, if you will,” says Prillinger, who is also 39. “When design is truly exciting, you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen.” But that doesn’t mean turning things over entirely to the forces of chaos. “Of course you still want to guide the design, like training a plant,” Ogrydziak says. “When we set up the program to be totally random, there was no tension in it, so we had to modify it. But every time you press ‘Go,’ the program does something that you couldn’t have done by hand.”

After teaming up in 2000, the architects looked at ways to break out of what Prillinger describes as “the inheritance of classic modernism, a staunchly retrograde attachment to the Cartesian grid.” A series of well-received residential projects included Honighaus, a remodeled Edwardian home with a dramatically angled penthouse in San Francisco’s Lower Pacific Heights neighborhood. The architects make use of Rhino, ArchiCAD, and other 3-D-modeling tools in their practice but began developing their own design tools a couple of years ago. They used a visual-programming tool called Processing, designed specifically for artists. Through it, Ogrydziak was able to get comfortable enough with computer programming to write his own code.

The architects first introduced controlled randomness into their work with a CNC-milled concrete wall, a water feature at Honighaus. The program generated graceful, origamilike pleats for the water to flow over. “It’s scary at first to build something straight from the computer,” Ogrydziak says. “We wouldn’t have had the guts to do that with the facade here if we hadn’t already had that experience.”

Ogrydziak/Prillinger had the chance to try a little more randomness in the roof garden of the Gallery House. Dotted among the alien-looking succulents are more of what the architects call “mathematical-organic” objects. Pavers marked with the facade’s mesh pattern have irregular forms generated by a complementary algorithm. Three intricately faceted boulders, created by manipulating geometric solids, serve as benches. In this otherworldly sculpture garden, rocks have been swapped out for counterparts from a parallel universe. “We’re trying to see a world with many, many options and then selecting a few,” Prillinger says. “We’re trying to see a space for design as charged with possibility.”

What do the architects hope to do next? “We’d like to see how we can introduce that sense of discovery to an entire building,” Ogrydziak says. “It’s interesting to see what happens when there isn’t a neat resolution, that there’s some messiness to a project.”