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FPmod: Where the wild things are made
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Florencia Pita thinks cities should have more sleeping monsters. At least one, maybe two, just a few at the most. “We haven’t been able to move past Modernism,” says the architect, professor, and principal of three-person Los Angeles–based architecture firm FPmod, which she founded in 2006. “Neoclassicism never died!” Pita’s lament is hardly a rant. Her sense of playfulness is too prominent, and she’s too immersed in a world where “sleeping monsters” — intricate, polymorphous, digitally created designs — exist, to really spend much time shaking her fist at Modernism. FPmod thrives on what Pita calls the “Mannerist use of digital technology.”
Alice, LAxART Gallery, Los Angeles, 2007
To view projects by FPmod click here.
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Before you fling down your pencil and storm off mumbling about practical application, realize that this architect learned her way around a pencil before she became fascinated by and dedicated to the digital age of architecture. She got her undergraduate architecture degree in her home country of Argentina, at the National University of Rosario, where she says all she did was draw for six years. “We didn’t have a more liberal arts degree in architecture where I went to school,” she says. “It was very focused, and all with paper and a pencil.” After graduating, she moved to New York and worked for Peter Eisenman, then went to Columbia University for her graduate degree.
Columbia was where she began her relationship with the computer — a relationship that went into overdrive when she moved to Los Angeles and took a job at Greg Lynn FORM. Working with that master of blobitecture and with Asymptote made her realize how much she loved the immediacy of programs such as Maya. “For me, it’s a revolution,” she says.
Pita’s installation work is currently her firm’s major focus. From SCI-Arc — where she teaches full-time — to the Chicago Art Institute to the MAK Museum in Vienna, her work is gaining interest because of its intense explorations of color, materials, fabrication, and spatial possibilities. For Pita and her students, the practical application of her work to the world of architecture lies in the testing. “It is impossible to talk about a project without talking about how it was made,” she says. “It’s all object based, and everything has a function.” Pita says she thinks her work’s link to product design is stronger than the link to art. That connection has led her to design furniture, and she is currently designing a line of jewelry.
But what about buildings? While Pita loves the immediacy of installation work and the high-level of freedom it brings her to test and explore, she is still waiting for that building project “to come knocking at my door.” “That is the expectation for my firm, yes,” she says. Until then, she has a full plate of installations and teaching gigs at SCI-Arc and abroad. When that project, the monster, comes to her door, though, Pita will be delighted to get to work getting him back to sleep in some corner of some city.
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