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By Ingrid Spencer

Paul Preissner, AIA, principal of Chicago-based architecture and urban design firm Qua’virarch, certainly has the gene for the mechanics of design: His father and brother are both engineers. But his take on the process and practice is much less calculated than theirs—he values atmosphere and intuition above precision and defined environments. In fact, Preissner teaches a class to advanced visual studies students at the Art Institute of Chicago using horror films as vehicles to understanding the psychology of space—how scary movies use atmosphere to dissolve the boundaries between the viewer and the screen. He then has students explore advanced software techniques to produce new atmospheres that dissolve the boundaries between surface, structure, ornamentation, and effect. “Of course, you don’t view architecture the way you would a painting or a film,” says Preissner, “but horror movies have a certain necessity and risk that gets you to intuitively see spaces in a different way.”

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Preissner founded Qua’virarch (“It’s just a made-up word,” he says) in Los Angeles three years ago, after stints working as a design architect for Kyodo Sekkei Architects in Osaka, Japan; as a senior designer at Eisenman Architects and at Philip Johnson’s office, in New York City; and as a junior architect and project architect, respectively, in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s and Wood-Zapata’s Chicago offices. He says he learned a lot from the firms he worked for, as well as from the cities he worked in. “Living in Osaka and New York City gave me a love for condensed living and networked systems,” he says.

Preissner’s work also reflects his love for spaces that are more about intuitive feeling than rationalized geometry. His interior project for Chicago’s Aguasal, a flotation center that offers visitors time in sensory-deprivation tanks to experience the benefits of weightlessness, seems right up his alley. Preissner was asked to transform the center’s interior to create the impression of a nonconfining space. The architect produced flowing patterns of blue-tinted, molded-fiberglass panels below the ceiling, adding to the heightened sensory awareness visitors experience after spending time in the tanks.

Another project, a competition entry for the expansion of the West End Bridge in Pittsburgh, has Preissner proposing a steel braid across the river with pedestrian bridge, bicycle path, and periodically spaced observation bubbles. When completed, the bridge will close the loop in the trails around Pittsburgh’s three rivers. Preissner’s design “has neither a beginning nor an end,” he says, “and it lives in a moment of passion and emotion.” For Preissner, inspiration comes from emotion. “I don’t think of my work as sculpture,” he says, “but I am inspired by the work of immersive artists like Matthew Barney. I understand the realisms architects have to face,” he says, “and restraint is okay, because it pushes you, but ideally I appreciate less obvious environments—grittier, less defined. A torn edge is more interesting than a clean-cut edge.”

With Qua’virarch projects in the works, Preissner also teaches at the University of Illinois-Chicago and at SCI-Arc, in Los Angeles, as well as Chicago’s Art Institute. In addition, he is writing a book about the emotional aspects of space. “It’s about the ability of architecture to create new feelings,” he says, “and how this is done not through a sculptural process, but through expert directing of material. Architecture is essentially choreography, after all.”