Brooks Outside: Pour Me Another

Operating in a territory between architecture, art and industrial design, LA-based Ball-Nogues Studio (BNS) is an integrated design and fabrication practice led by Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues. Essential to each BNS project is the “design” of the production process itself, with the aim of creating environments that enhance sensation, generate spectacle and invite physical engagement.

For Pour Me Another, the studio experiments with “the pour,” which resonates with such mid-century abstract painters as Jackson Pollock and contemporary sculptors and designers like Lynda Benglis and Gaetano Pesce. BNS pours tinted urethane foam in multiple layers to produce monumental structures that are aesthetically vibrant and structurally wind resistant. While the interior of the domes is smooth, like a painting, and similar to “light coming through a bowl of melted Jolly Ranchers,” the exterior appears like “cultivated slop,” says Ball.

Ball’s process entails developing a system of pours that are both controlled and loose. “Letting go,” he notes, “is the flip side of control. If one is conscious of it, letting go can be another mode of control. It is knowing when and where to let go that keeps the work from becoming a chaotic heap,” an observation that provides an apt metaphor for turbulent events this past year, and so many collective attempts at control, containing chaos, and embracing liberation.

BNS has won numerous awards, including three American Institute of Architects (AIA) Design Awards and the 2007 Museum of Modern Art PS1 Young Architects Design Competition. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.