Tom Wiscombe - LA Forum for Architecture - Part 3

Born in 1970 in La Jolla, California, Tom Wiscombe is an architectural designer based in Los Angeles. In 1999, he founded EMERGENT, a platform for researching issues of materiality, technology, and systems through built form. EMERGENT is particularily interested in destratifying space— in creating new architectures through the generation of coherent, operational relationships between buildings components and building systems. The work is positioned within the larger paradigm of systems theory, emergence science, and the philosophical discussion of part and whole.

EMERGENT recently won second place in the international competition for the Seoul Performing Arts Center. Their work was showcased in a solo show at the UCLA Architecture Gallery entitled 'Notes on Micromultiplicity' in early 2005. Other exhibitions include the MoMA San Francisco show 'Glamour: Fabricating Affluence' in 2004, ArchiLAB (Orléan) in 2003 and 2001, and MoMA Queens in 2003. Their work is part of the permanent collections of the FRAC Centre (Paris) as well as of MoMA San Francisco and recently, MoMA New York. In 2003, EMERGENT won the competition for the reknowned P.S.1/ MoMA Urban Beach project, which opened to critical acclaim and won the New York Engineering Excellence Platinum Award for 2004. EMERGENT was also awarded the Architectural League of New York Young Architects Award for 2004.

The work of EMERGENT has been extensively published, notably in SURFACE*, VOGUE, Architectural Record, Architectural Digest, PRAXIS, Metropolis, A+U, Perspecta, OZ, and The New York Times.

Wiscombe was Senior Designer and Project Partner at Coop Himmelb(l)au for over 10 years, right-hand to Principal Wolf Prix. He was in charge of various international projects, including the Dresden UFA Cinema Palace, completed in 1998, and the Lyon Musée des Confluences, the Akron Art Museum, and the BMW World, Munich, all of which are in their final stages of completion.

Educated at UCLA (M. Arch. I) and UC Berkeley, Wiscombe has taught design and technology at SCI_Arc, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He was the Esherick Chair of Architecture at UCB for 2005, and is currently teaching in the postgraduate program at SCI-Arc.

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