This collection is a highly collaborative project between LSSAA, the clients, and their architect, Stephen Verner. The sculptural focus is inspired by artists who explore the connection between science and art, reflecting the client’s background as software engineers.
Working closely with architect Stephen Verner, we embarked on a highly collaborative journey to integrate art into the home’s architecture, beginning with a custom load bearing staircase. Verner’s design approach emphasized materiality, giving the residence a distinctive character, and we complemented this by placing sculptural artworks in a variety of mediums.
Gabriel Orozco’s aluminum artwork exemplifies his mastery of conceptual art, drawing from his Mexican heritage and artistic forebears like Marcel Duchamp.
In Secuencia Modular, Gabriel Orozco utilizes axles to imply movement, expansion, and interaction. Using objects and materials from his everyday encounters and routines, Orozco’s work explores philosophical conundrums through creative associations and spatial relationships.
Widely considered one of the world’s foremost sculptors, Tony Cragg is perhaps best known for his explorations of unconventional materials, including plastic, fiberglass, bronze, and Kevlar. Craggs’ sculptures embody a frozen moment of movement, resulting in swirling abstractions, as in Untitled (2018). He understands sculpture as a study of how material and forms affect and form our ideas and emotions, explaining: “Making a new form gives us a new word, gives us a new term, gives us a new emotion. Sculpture expands the possibilities of our own horizons and allows us to expand our imagination.”
Pae White is an American multimedia artist, who seamlessly merges art, design, and craft to create objects and installations layered with different media and meaning. IB_0005, takes its name from one of the five elements of the soul in ancient Egyptian thought – referred to as the heart. Through a meticulous process that involves photography, digital manipulation, and skilled weaving, White creates a grand-scale tapestry that embodies the evocative qualities of smoke.
Tokyo artist Sohei Nishino combines photography, collage, cartography and psychogeography to create large prints of urban landscapes. Diorama Map of San Francisco (2016) belongs to his famous Diorama Map series, the production of which involves Nishino’s walking of the streets of a city with a camera for several months before compiling the views to form a grand tableau.
After walking the streets of a new city, Nishino collects numerous “fragments” or memories that he has captured with his camera. He then assembles these fragments onto various canvases, reconstructing the specificities of each city through photography and collage. This unique approach transcends the traditional bird’s-eye view of the city, offering a unique understanding of three-dimensional places within a two-dimensional space.
Tomas Saraceno, an Argentine artist, has captured the art world’s attention with his interdisciplinary approach to art, drawing inspiration from the fields of engineering, aeronautics, and natural sciences. Through his interactive installations, Saraceno presents innovative and sustainable approaches to inhabiting our environment. This particular piece showcases his fascination with astronomy and the vastness of the cosmos.
American artist Tara Donovan showcases her signature approach of transforming everyday objects into mesmerizing compositions. Through the meticulous arrangement of thousands of nickel-plated steel pins on white gatorboard, the artwork blurs the boundaries between drawing and sculpture, showing its shimmering gradients and the play of light and shadow.
Tara Donovan’s large-scale installations and sculptures encompass a wide range of materials, not limited to steel pins but also tooth picks, scotch tape, and styrofoam cups. Her artistic vision is fueled by the distinct qualities and properties of these materials, allowing her to unveil their hidden potential and transform them into remarkable works of art.
Tomas Saraceno’s immersive exhibition, Stillness in Motion – Cloud Cities, at SFMOMA deeply resonated with our clients. This experience led our clients to commission a freestanding outdoor sculpture from Saraceno. This piece explores the molecular structure of foam and its scientific principles, inviting viewers to appreciate the intricate complexity, symmetry and beauty of the natural world on a monumental scale.
Before settling on the artist Tomas Saraceno, we created an extensive proposal featuring similarly minded artists from Ernesto Neto and George Rickey to Jeppe Hein and Olafur Eliasson.
Pae White’s current in-studio production starts with Japanese paper clay, a soft and malleable material that dries on its own. The flexibility of clay allows her to experiment with different tools (clothespins, batteries, toilet paper holders, plastic forks, and bobbins) that she acquires from Daiso, the 99 Cents store, or a local flea market, to create various imprints. In the application of color, she employs paint to travel through the moist clay from the backside to the front, and finishes the pieces with car paint. In the work above, you will see the dynamic interplay of hues, mirroring the fluid motion of the functioning clock hands.
We collaborated with the architect to advise on a custom load-bearing steel staircase for the three-story home. We enlisted the local artist Adam Feibelman, who designed cut paper artwork inspired by the client’s Chinese heritage. Feibelman integrates these elements to create an interactive scene where zodiac animals are depicted in different branches of a symbolic “family tree”. After the artist had hand stenciled the paper cutouts, the architect oversaw the team who digitized the designs and cut the steel railings using a water jet process. This project is a great example of how important it is to prioritize art from the early stages of architectural planning.
Ruth Aiko Asawa was an American artist known for her biomorphic wire forms and public art installations. Fifteen of Asawa’s wire sculptures are on permanent display in the San Francisco’s de Young Museum, and several of her fountains are located in public spaces throughout the city. The hanging sculpture above is constructed from a complex composition of “continuous” copper wire, an accumulation of repeated gesture and devoted, almost imperceptible, labor.