Xefirotarch: Design September 3, 2006

The fourth installment in SFMOMA's design series features the work of Xefirotarch, a Los Angeles-based firm focused on architecture, product and digital motion design. Led by founding principal Hernan Diaz Alonso, Xefirotarch's work presents a figurative approach and suggests new direction in architecture that can be facilitated through digital conception and production. The firm's designs showcase an aesthetic that is excessive and ambiguous--almost anthropomorphic in quality--that illustrates an interest in baroque sculpture and the film work of Matthew Barney, in which characters mutate between human and animal forms. Xefirotarch's designs are relentlessly sensual, undulating masses that blur visual and spatial boundaries between surface articulation, decoration, structure and enclosure. They reveal an original, distinctly figurative architectural vocabulary that is furthering the pedagogy, theory and practice of architecture.