Metropolis Magazine: The Select Ten
Design’s leading voices help us identify the next wave of burgeoning talent.
October 2013
“When we began our search for pathbreaking emerging designers, we knew part of the effort would involve reaching out to influential figures in design who have an almost innate ability to spot fresh promise. All ten experts have displayed not just a sharp eye but also a gut instinct for sniffing out the future. And together they’ve helped us assemble an impressive group of new talent.
We think the Select Ten represent a generational portrait. Although their work ranges far and wide, they seem to share a way of working marked by fluidity—between the digital and the hand, between disciplines, between collaborators and colleagues. It feels less about personal expression (although all the work is uniformly expressive) and more about a shared vision. As we move forward, this seems particularly hopeful given the larger challenges ahead. In the meantime, enjoy the creative pyrotechnics on the pages below. This is just the beginning for all of them.” —Martin C. Pedersen
From the beginning, Ball-Nogues has occupied an unusual space between art and design-build. The Los Angeles–based studio’s two principals, Benjamin Ball (pictured left) and Gaston Nogues, are both 45-year-old SCI-Arc grads who have done stints at Gehry Partners—one of their first projects together was a giant, golden shade structure constructed of deftly manipulated Mylar that floated over a courtyard on a busy street in the Silver Lake neighborhood of L.A. Their work remains more an examination of materials than it is a creation of forms.
Take Euphony, a recent project inside the atrium of the Music City Center in Nashville. The building was conceived as a giant guitar, and within it, Ball-Nogues’s 110-foot-high draped sculpture seems to quiver in space. This evanescence is extraordinary when you realize that it’s achieved with 28 miles of stainless steel ball chain, and 1,800 pounds of material arranged in catenary curves that form a spiraling, twisted surface. “It’s about finding the vocabulary that’s feasible for chain,” Ball says. “We wouldn’t know the full extent of what it could be if we didn’t know the full extent of the logistics.”
The studio has done earlier projects along these lines, including a 2009 installation for Museum of Contemporary Art that involved 3,604 separate lengths of colored twine. Euphony grew from that, allowing Ball and Nogues to refine certain techniques—including the creation
of a custom software, which enabled them to control and design the proximity between the lines, as well as a machine that colors and cuts the individual lengths of twine or chains. —Jade Chang
“The funny little secret of digitally enabled architecture is how much craft, how much painstaking hands-on work, is required to build the most fluid designs,” says Christopher Hawthorne of the Los Angeles Times. “Ball-Nogues fundamentally understands and embraces that.”
