CODA's Party Wall (2013) might be the beginning of a different story about the digital transformation of architecture. While also conceived as an aggregation project using CNC-fabricated parts, Party Wall does not revolve around the mass-customization of individual components. Instead, the pavilion's parts came from the off-cuts of industry-standard skateboards transformed to achieve a dual legibility of array and surface. In other words, CODA found 'bricks' that had already been produced. Put simply, Party Wall is both hair and hairdo—a wall guided by a raster logic that makes a new composition out of found objects. The use of the digitally fabricated leftover toggles the viewer's attention from the part to the whole so that neither dominates. Instead, one flicks back and forth between object and field. Party Wall alludes to but reroutes architecture's place in the digital realm, continuing an important disciplinary conversation about collage and the as-found.
Picking up where Lynn left off with the Toy Furniture series, CODA's Urchin (2016) reopens the part-to-whole dialogue between the hair and the hairdo by aggregating found-objects. In Urchin's case, the problem of the eccentric part is also tested with more familiar and readily available everyday items in the form of lawn chairs. Akin to Reiser + Umemoto's collage problems, this update to the hair-and-hairdo problem transcends the technical difficulties of the individual digital part, instead prompting the viewers to look for unexpected redeeming qualities in the objects that are all around us. It is not only a simple and made-new part, but also a generous acknowledgement about the beauty of an existing object.
Where Duchamp saw the urinals for the fountains, CODA saw the chairs for Urchin. Moreover, compared to the over-articulated hair of Payne's or the easy hairdo of Hejduk's, CODA attentively works with both the part and the whole, creating a new graphic language that is able to mediate between multiple scales and resolutions. In other words, both the hair and the haircut are simple, legible, and intrinsic to the architecture. It is also easy to slip between the two, to be between object and field in a way that the 2019 Lion King could not. Urchin is an easy-whole made from easy-parts.
The more literally furry, Combust, begins life as a hairy object, where the hair is generated by hundreds of matchsticks adhered to a thin surface. Like a chrysalid undergoing a state of metamorphosis, the model is liberated by being set on fire. Here, Combust switches its operation to be more like the House of the Suicide, where all hair is lost and only the outline of a shape remains. As this model disappears into the flame, it recalls the way that the hair on Akira Toriyama's cartoon character, Goku, turns from the many parts into a graphic whole the moment he goes "Super Saiyan" for the first time. This easy outline describes the metamorphosis of the character transformation.
Finally, in OMG's 2017 pavilion Primitive Hut, hair and hairdo become literal. The pavilion's hairs are not minimally milled and notched components. Instead, the hair is the wild and unruly shag bursting through the roof in the form of four maple trees. This living hair is in a constant state of change in color, density, and scale, across seasons and years. This move to a more literal understanding of transformation marks the transition from the representation of hair to a literal living, growing, and shedding material.