ABSTRACT
The Morphosis Studio building was designed to change its properties in response to variations in the ambient conditions. This temporal modality reflects the building’s ability to negotiate internal and external swings through diurnal and seasonal cycles. When Morphosis was ready to move out of their workshop and offices in Santa Monica, California, they found an irregularly shaped vacant lot in Culver City for their new home. The twenty-first-century version installed on the roof of the Morphosis Studio is a monodraught wind catcher that exchanges outside air with the building’s interiors within one device. The building pushes up against the site boundary with masonry walls facing south and east, uninterrupted by any openings. For centuries, wind catchers have been used to improve comfort in buildings. Rayner Banham wrote extensively about buildings as comfortable “environments fit for human activities”. The Morphosis Studio is not only a sustainable work environment for the production of architectural services. It is also a design laboratory.
