From Pavilions in China to Horizons in Malibu, Geoffrey von Oeyen blurs boundaries and explores the means and methods of architectural exploration at both environmental and social scales. 

For this week's Studio Snapshot, Geoffrey von Oeyen Design walks us through how their firm is pushing from conventional building substrate to conventional substrate of other construction methods from other industries. 

Where and When did your studio start?

Los Angeles in 2011, but I didn’t formally publish work under the name until about 2014, when I needed to formalize the office for the Architectural League Prize press materials and exhibition in New York.

How did you come up with your name and company ethos?

My parents came up with the name for me back in Detroit when I was born. I used it in lieu of some idea or concept, even an open-ended one, because I don’t know what concepts will be essential to the firm in the future. Architecture as a career is a marathon, and I would like the firm to last for a while—hopefully, a lifetime. Having conceptualized architectural design first through historical research at Stanford, and then philosophy at Cambridge after that, I learned that the core principals one might find to be most essential in one worldview may be irrelevant in another. As for “Design,” well, it is most generally what the firm does. And I would like to expand the firm’s work to design at many scales, from the city master plan to the detail, and I would like to get more involved with various technologies of architecture and construction, including prefabrication.

... my goal would be to create some alchemy that transforms typical site conditions into an extraordinary experience for people interacting in a place— the proverbial straw into gold

Regarding the ethos, my goal would be to create some alchemy that transforms typical site conditions into an extraordinary experience for people interacting in a place— the proverbial straw into gold. But in difficult projects, just to figure out how to make lemonade with lemons can be challenging enough. Or even to figure out what kind of fruit you’ve been handed. In general, I try to leverage geometric relationships and site conditions to create visual overlays for the spatial registration of place. I want the projects to be optical devices specifically adapted to represent familiar contexts in unanticipated ways and to design them as geometric realignments that reframe and redirect views. While transforming familiar typologies such as houses and strip malls, I try to solve physical, phenomenal issues of daylight, space and view as sources of recurring visual discovery.

How many people work at your firm?

Varies—about 3-5, depending on project needs/deadlines. I’m starting a few new projects right now and would appreciate some talented colleagues to join who have a few years of experience. I need folks who can carefully translate conversations and sketches toward architectural designs and details. Having taught undergraduate core studios for many years, I used to think that verbal communication was not as important as drawing skills. The more I practice, the more I realize that both are essential. The more that I can efficiently communicate a mental image or concept with colleagues at the office, be it a parti or a construction detail, the better the project. And as my projects have very specific geometric relationships, understanding the key concepts about parametric relationships between parts is essential.

What motivated your decision to start an office?

I had wanted to start an office since I was an undergraduate, and spent what I felt to be a long time training to do my own thing. I did a four-year undergraduate degree in Urban Studies at Stanford, followed by an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Architecture, followed by my MArch at the Harvard GSD, followed by nearly seven years of work for Gehry Partners. And while I was working for Frank Gehry, I was faithful to the firm and wasn’t moonlighting or teaching. I worked long hours and traveled extensively on about a dozen international projects as an Associate, including four years on the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and about two years on the Business School at the University of Technology, Sydney. When I left the office, I had a handful of clients who were ready to start work when I was.

Do you have partners and how did you decide to work with partners and where did you meet?

Right now I have more work than I can process with the office staff as is, and I need to find someone who wants to take on more of a project management role. I need to free up more of my time to do what I do best, which is design, and less time coordinating the work and managing the office logistics. This is a common problem for many small practices, but I also see the problem when design leaders attempt to delegate their responsibility to actively manage the internal strategies and workflows that allow for a firm to sustain a critical practice.

What are other offices that you look at for guidance and why?

So many. As a starting point, I would mention that some of the firms for whom I have worked, collaborated with on professional projects, and been educated by include Gehry Partners, EC3, Greg Lynn FORM, Preston Scott Cohen, Toshiko Mori, Machado Silvetti, MOS, Ball Nogues, WW, Johnston Marklee, MADA, Marga Jann, SO-IL, Young Projects, Amy Murphy, DOSO Studio, Kreysler & Associates, but there are so many more. 

On a day-to-day basis, my colleagues and friends at USC have been remarkably supportive, professionally, creatively, and academically, including our program directors and colleagues who are doing significant design research and maintaining critical practices. I'm grateful to faculty who have worked with me while I have served as a studio coordinator, those who have coordinated studios I have taught, and my many peers with whom I have been teaching and bouncing ideas off of for years-- that type of ongoing guidance is essential. It has been so helpful to hear what it means to balance teaching with practice, and above all, how to maintain a critical practice. I have looked to guidance from many firms who have served on the advisory board of the LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design while I was President; their help was invaluable. And I am in awe of my many contemporaries: good friends and colleagues in Los Angeles and elsewhere throughout the world who are pushing critical practices and exploring new ways to approach representation, narrative, community, technology, and construction.  And I still look for guidance from those peers with whom I have been through formative experiences at the GSD, Gehry Partners, the Architectural League, the MacDowell Colony, the American Academy in China-- folks who are doing remarkable and diverse work.

I would like the firm to be known for architecturally reconciling differences between ideas, disciplines, techniques, uses, and cultures

What would you want your firm to be known for?       

I would like the firm to be known for architecturally reconciling differences between ideas, disciplines, techniques, uses, and cultures; for creating a constructive composite of diverse sources and needs. I’m very much engaged in this concept of “composite figures;” I would like to use geometry, technology, and materiality to realign divergent elements and to bring people together through architecture, exploring innovative tectonic systems that leverage precedent, site, and community to reconcile disparate visual, spatial, and cultural conditions.

What were the first 365 days like?

It was both turbulent and super energetic. My first office was in the back of a developer’s office in Century City. The rent was cheap, and I soon found out that he was unable to maintain his lease on the floor. We were doing architectural studies in exchange for rent. As his renters started leaving, the floor began to empty out, and huge corner offices opened up. I would be often standing in these big, vacant offices with floor to ceiling glass, overlooking LA, and take my calls. Very surreal, but exciting, as I began work on the first commissions, some of which were unusual. My first residential project contract ended when the clients, a couple I liked very much, filed for divorce halfway through the project for unrelated reasons. At the same time, I was doing some NDA protected work for a very well known professional surfer and his wave machine company in California, which was quite surreal. And I was starting to teach at both UC Berkeley and USC at the time, spending some nights at the Harwell Harris house overlooking the San Francisco Bay. And top it off, my younger son was born the night before my students’ first final reviews at USC—both the students and I pulled all-nighters in that case. It was wild but wonderful.

What were the biggest obstacles along the way?

The Woolsey Fire. It burned down the Horizon House in early November just was we were putting the finishing touches on the construction. I was there the night before and the day of to help with the evacuation, and it was terrifying. The power cut out, and there was no cell phone communication, and no firefighters or aircraft anywhere to help. It was silent, save for the wind and the raining ash. I had to leave as the fire was coming down Decker Canyon adjacent to the house. I spent five years on that project, and it was very personal for me, as it was designed for my brother, and he trusted me entirely with his life savings and then some, and it was a collaborative dream to work together. I felt so good about the design and its execution—blood, sweat, and tears to get it right, down to the precise saw-cut intersections of the three-way floor grid in the sand-finish concrete floor.

...I still look for guidance from those peers with whom I have been through formative experiences at the GSD, Gehry Partners, the Architectural League, the MacDowell Colony, the American Academy in China...

Architecturally, the Horizon House was designed to geometrically transform a generic 1960s ranch house into an optical device for framing panoramic views of the Pacific horizon in western Malibu. The space in the intersection of the original L-shaped house, where two wings met in closest proximity to the ocean, lacked unobstructed ocean views, space for large gatherings and classical music performances, and outdoor space. However, planning restrictions limited the addition and renovation to less than 1000 square feet, and less than half of the elevations altered. The design reconciled the massing of the existing wings, and it negotiated the two axes of a grid with a third axis, thereby uniting the two halves of the house to reframe the horizon above an infinity pool and spa. The existing ranch house ceiling was removed and its roof bisected, reconstructed in steel, lifted, and reoriented due south. These new roof planes refocused the view to the horizon, transforming perspectives inside and outside of the house. 

Operable skylights and awnings modulated the daylight and allowed for passive ventilation, and the roofscape was an animated archipelago of extrusions against the horizon. The large, chamfered southern clear-span addition to the project allowed for a new pool to be oriented east-west for maximum ocean and daylight exposure along the south-facing coastline. The horizon was mirrored by horizontal framing devices, such as the 57-ft clear span truss in parallel with the pool, and cantilevered aluminum frames, supporting operable fabric shade canopies, created visual and physical extensions outward. It was everything I had hope that it could have been, and now it’s gone.

I woke up on December 3rd to find the remains of the house on the front cover of the LA Times. And that made it so real. The construction permit is still good, as it was a remodel with no final certificate of occupancy, and we can “resume” construction. The intellectual question in the original project was how to reconcile the ranch house precedent and the remarkable view and light that were not being addressed. Now I’m dealing with the legal ghost of the precedent; how to respond to the now destroyed existing conditions. I feel like I’m shadowboxing with both the original ranch house and how I had transformed it. As permits are extremely hard to come by in that particular neighborhood given siting and water service requirements, I’m going to have to play within the rules and make minor modifications as are needed to intellectually respond to the rebuild.

How does academia work its way into your work?

Academia is an essential part of my practice. It is where I explore ideas and make clear my values. There is no better way to reinforce one’s values than to state them to younger folks who both rely on your knowledge and challenge what you tell them. It keeps you honest with yourself about what matters in design. I have been dealing with precedent and site extensively in my professional work, and I have been addressing precedent academically in my teaching. For several years I coordinated first-year studio at USC, where students documented and analyzed the Schindler Kings Road House in order to generate their own architectural systems, and I have done the same things with civic buildings, housing, and extra-disciplinary design objects, such as sailboats and aircraft.

I’ve been thinking about the relationships between geometry, materials, and construction, and have, since my MPhil dissertation on Chandigarh, been thinking about what it means to build in rural and undeveloped areas within developing economies. For the past four years I have been studying village development in rural China, and have led architectural research on the relationships between urban, rural, and industrial development through the USC American Academy in China (AAC), and have presented that work in symposia and exhibitions in Xi’an and Shenzhen. In 2017, I led a team of graduate students from both the AAC and the Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology to work in collaboration with local builders and laborers in Lantian, Shaanxi, to realize the construction of his design for a permanent public pavilion on county land in the agricultural landscape, sponsored by the regional government and a local winery. 

In this project, digital design techniques were integrated with rural tectonic traditions, and western building materials were adapted to traditional construction methods to reimagine a new critical regionalism for contemporary rural China. The design of the ruled surfaces of the symmetrical walls, constructed of dimensional lumber, change in angle, density, and pattern, allowing for varied daylight conditions, visual screening, wind baffling, and degrees of enclosure for standing, sitting, or napping. Supported by concrete columns recalling the slender concrete trellis posts in the vineyard, the pavilion's wooden structure appears in reciprocity with the landscape. The design of the pavilion’s scale, orientation, proximity to the hillside, and degrees of visual transparency are intended to both register and intensify one’s experience of the bucolic site conditions. The pavilion, focused on a view across vineyards framing the local mountains, and used for relaxation by farmers and tourists alike, became a scenographic tool that highlights critical issues of class, wealth, land ownership, development, agricultural production, and the global image of contemporary rural China. My US students participated in an unprecedented collaboration with local students, as well as local construction professionals and laborers. Young, wealthy, highly educated yet unskilled students humbled themselves to learn from old, poor, uneducated yet skilled craftspeople of both genders. A photo of young women enjoying the pavilion with friends is currently in use for a regional rebranding campaign by the city of Xi’an.

For the past several years I been thinking primarily about housing, and considering ways to productively disrupt the inertia inherent to traditional means and methods of housing construction. My undergraduate topic and graduate thesis students at USC are working in multidisciplinary ways to provide leadership toward solutions to the housing crisis in Los Angeles. These studio courses and seminars concern design research in the development of housing architecture in Los Angeles using Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) composites. Current housing in Los Angeles, both in its materials and its configurations, will not be able to satisfy the demand for the millions of additional units that have been estimated as required to stabilize housing prices. The students are therefore studying new designs, materials, and methods for multiunit housing at all scales in an effort to pursue community inclusion in the face of gentrification, new models for public and private collaborations, new models for economic viability, and environmental resilience. Leaders from NOMA and Imagine LA have reviewed and critiqued the work, exploring with the students how to best serve neighborhoods through the designs, and to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within communities. To support materials exploration in this study, my students have begun a collaboration with the aerospace engineering laboratory at the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC and guest workshops with Neil Smith from Composites One.

Similar to how Le Corbusier envisioned a new architectural system for housing that would respond to aesthetic, technical, and cultural forces, my design research proposes in the 21st century with FRP composites what the Dom-Ino was to reinforced concrete in the 20th. FRP, including fiberglass and carbon fiber, has been in wide use in other disciplines throughout the 20th century, such as naval architecture and aerospace engineering, and is only now making its way into more widespread architectural use, similar to how reinforced concrete was largely limited to infrastructure and industrial buildings in the 19th century and was only seen as a desirable architectural material in the 20th. Much like the Dom-Ino, the students are each creating their own FRP system of housing architecture that operates from the scale of the design detail to the urban master plan. Students have created prefabricated panels, modules, and housing units that can be nested on trucks and assembled on site. The flexibility afforded by these high-strength, lightweight systems allows for various configurations of common spaces. The figuration of these spaces reinterpret Giovanni Battista Nolli’s Nuova pianta di Roma to discover the spectrum of gray spaces between public and private in contemporary Los Angeles and ask questions about how private housing might provide public amenities that reinforce diverse communities. These composite figures, both literally and metaphorically, speak to a future of housing in Los Angeles in which individual parts come together to refigure and reform culturally, economically, and environmentally sustainable living arrangements.

What are you currently working on?

We’re exploring the concept of resilience at a number of scales, both environmental and social. The Woolsey Fire was a chance for me to reflect about what it means to design for resiliency, as I am reconsidering how to rebuild the Horizon House. I’m also designing the neighbor’s house, which was upwind of the Horizon House during the fire and burned down first, as well as a few other new houses in the burn area of Western Malibu. I’m considering how to design for the inevitability of fire, without fire becoming the inevitable reason for design. I’m working with homeowners, developers, planners, and the mayor and city council officials in Malibu to consider the best paths forward. Aspects of sustainability, resilience, and prefabrication are all ripe for exploration, and the City Council in Malibu is receptive to my ideas. At the same time, we’re beginning construction of an off-the-grid house in central California, and am considering new ways to address the natural environment responsively.

In parallel, we’re working on ways to make our community of Los Angeles more resilient as we approach housing justice. I am currently working in multidisciplinary ways to provide leadership in the solution of the housing crisis in Los Angeles, and am in conversations with the City and County of Los Angeles to consider how to best help. I made this a priority as President of the Los Angeles Forum for Urban Design, and am now serving on the Episcopal Housing Task Force with Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena looking at how church properties can incorporate housing. I’m also working with Imagine LA founder Jill Bauman to consider ways that housing can be designed in South LA in public-private partnerships with organizations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church. From a master-planning perspective, I’m looking for ways to create a significant, positive impact in Los Angeles with the intent to realize new housing prototypes in collaboration with the American Composites Manufacturing Association.

What other avenues of creative exploration does your office pursue?

Drawing is something that I have done so much of in the past, and I am trying to refocus the work using drawing as a medium. When I did my MacDowell Fellowship, I had the time to draw for hours on end. It is where I considered how to imagine composites in architecture. I drew and wrote a fictional piece about living in such a space. Considering how to figure space using a new materiality is where we will be investing more time as a firm. Representation, be it in drawing, writing, or film, is where I will need to invest more creative energy in order to show the intent of the technical work. I’d like to bring the technique and the representation closer together.

What is the main Thesis of your office and has it changed over time?

I think that Preston Scott Cohen put it the best in Young Architects 16, Overlay: “von Oeyen extracts heretofore invisible spatial properties from the conventional, typological substrate of buildings. Rather than start with the ambition to generate novelty, von Oeyen, like Koolhaas and his forebearer exhibitors in Portoghesi’s Presence of the Past, prefers to discover new possibilities within the intractable givens, turning otherwise functionally necessary forms into optical devices that produce spatial experiences.” I’m trying to push that from conventional building substrate to conventional substrate of other construction methods from other industries. Whether by bisecting, redesigning, and reconstructing a 1960s house in Malibu to transform it into an optical device for registering the Pacific horizon, inverting the typical figuration of frontality, parking, and public space within three new buildings comprising a suburban Atlanta medical center, reconsidering the architectural opportunities of coastal dune erosion and storm surge resiliency in Puerto Rico, leveraging the skills of expert sailboat riggers in Los Angeles to fabricate operable canopies, or employing traditional village carpenters in rural China to assemble ruled surfaces, I have intentionally sought opportunities to critically reinterpret building typologies and construction techniques to geometrically and visually negotiate the internal order of a building with the parameters of its site to produce a new reading of place. By incorporating multidisciplinary practices and techniques from sailing and other fields, I'm hoping to find some unexpected opportunities about how we design and make buildings.

Where do you see the office in 5 years? In 10 Years?

In five years I would like to translate my conceptual work regarding composites from design research to implementation and practice. I have backing to do so from both the composites industry and major community organizations in Los Angeles, and would like to implement it to pursue critical social objectives regarding housing and community.

How do you look for talent for your office?

I love hiring talented former students, as we already have a working relationship and a trust that is in place. When I tell them to jump, they know that it is safe and productive to do so. The people I work with I care about—I care about their professional and creative development. They know that if I put them in a creatively new situation that we'll be exploring it together.  I look for folks who articulate verbally and graphically, who have a keen sense for design, can work well independently and with others, who have good judgment, and who want to learn how to put buildings together. And I look for maturity and judgment -- who has the capacity to make informed decisions.

What is the normal working process to your office and in what mediums do you work?

I meet with a client and discuss their project ideas, ideally on site. I talk through initial ideas on site, and will often sketch in situ. All of the projects start with a sketch, usually a plan, paraline, or a section. After we receive the site survey, I begin to work digitally, moving between 3D model and drawing, in a circular process, gaining creative momentum and clarity. I love 3D prints; there are sensorial things that one can learn from their sense of touch that you can’t learn with eyes. Geometry is super important to me, and I love to construct alignment between the parts of a building, its shared spaces, its site, daylight conditions, and views. Ultimately, the work has to serve people, and I am always searching to role play and empathize with people in the space. I would eventually like to incorporate more theater, video, and VR techniques within the practice to role-play the use and experience of spaces.