TELOS: The Fantastic World of Eugene Tssui is a slice of the architect's uphill battle against the built environment’s status quo, documenting his crusade for what he calls “Evolutionary Architecture”. Maligned for his off-beat sustainable design principles as a student and struggling to build as a professional, Tssui persists as a Renaissance Man -- an artist, athlete, teacher and designer, who just doesn’t seem made for these times.
Tssui’s architectural credo is on full display in his Ojo del Sol project, a purportedly indestructible house in Berkeley, California designed for Tssui’s parents. The house is perhaps better known as the Tardigrade House, a nickname borrowed from an eight-legged micro-organism capable of surviving in environments too harsh for most any other life form. Resembling an armored snail and built from recycled, sustainable materials, the house can allegedly stand up to any natural disaster imaginable. Plans for the house went through a gauntlet of NIMBY complaints and zoning hurdles before finally getting approved, but the house is still considered a local oddity, and its building strategy hasn’t found traction on larger scale developments.
Mainstream skepticism and aesthetic dismissal have long plagued Tssui’s practice, despite its explicit focus on laudable (and marketable) principles such as sustainability and environmental sensitivity. In her directorial debut, Kyung Lee’s documentary tries to understand what Tssui’s outsider status means in the shifting waters of architectural discourse, as the architect seeks approval for his TELOS project -- an education center in the small mountain town of Shasta, California.
My Cutting Room interview with both Tssui and Lee touches upon Tssui’s unlikely inspirations from teaching architecture in China, and the trials of being a dissenting voice within architecture’s dominant discourse.
TELOS will screen next as part of the San Francisco Green Film Festival on May 31st, its Bay Area premiere. The filmmakers are currently seeking opportunities for broadcast on educational television networks.
View the official trailer for TELOS below:
Former Managing Editor and Podcast Co-Producer for Archinect. I write, go to the movies, walk around and listen to the radio. My interests revolve around cognitive urban theory, psycholinguistics and food.Currently freelancing. Be in touch through longhyphen@gmail.com
1 Comment
Was watching a Netflix documentary on making a floating New Orleans and Tssui was interviewed quite a bit. I had never heard of him so went straight to google and found his website. The work reminded me of Glenn Small a bit, another architect with a Netflix documentary...not sure but I think the issue with mainstream architectural acceptance is - stylistic presentation. For instance the website appears to be circa 1995 with center justified text for the Ojo Del Sol. The renderings like Glenn Smalls appear to be psychedelic, like Donald Trump took some acid and found jesus in some seagull bone structure. And the suit that makes him appear to be a pilot on star trek....not having judged him on character and content I am already having a hard time getting pass the style. Its very feng shui ish which is hard for westerners to take seriously, thanks to descartes, we like to divide spiritual from rational so much the former may just be a fantasy anyway...I re-imagined him in a bow tie producing sleek parametric rhino vray renderings talking about biomimicry in a more formal way and he seems more believable. Ornament is really a crime in this "organic" stylized architecture unless a UL test could provide evidence of fire prevention? I guess some people think style is part of their character or rather style is the presentation of their character? it just to me to be an easy fix to be taken more seriously. Compare to Norman Foster's documentary also on Netflix - how much does your building weigh...even if Foster had built nothing in his career the method in which the work is stylized and presented is more convincing. It might just be me but I can't get pass the style...
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