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James Leng | Glacial Erratic

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Driving up Hwy 1 to The Sea Ranch last week, I passed through a stretch of Salt Point State Park that the Woodside Fire had swept through three weeks earlier. In the morning mist, the scene was a mixture of black char, fading red, and the sprinkled green of an already re-emerging underbrush. This fire was astonishing to me because it started right on the coast, a place I’d always assumed the marine layer kept protected.

I later learned that the retardant itself is mostly water and fertilizer, tinted with iron oxide for visibility. The pigment is engineered to be “fugitive,” meaning it disappears over time with exposure to sun and rain. The whole area looked like an immersive art installation — something Christo and Jeanne-Claude might have conjured, or in the vein of Olafur Eliasson’s Green River. But here the environment was painted in urgency, and the resulting anthropogenic sublime felt like terror, surreality, and maybe a bit of hope, all at once. taken in Salt Point State Park by @jamesleng

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a month ago

Windows becoming projectors on a foggy night. taken in Sea Ranch, California by @jamesleng

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a month ago

Visiting this 500-yr old Ming-dynasty manor in Anhui was deeply affecting. Looking at these walls textured by time, I can’t help but wish for a different attitude towards material and finish in the way we build today.

Distinctively, bright white was absent from the visual palette. Most white things we encounter in nature are small accents or fleeting - moonlight, a fleeting bloom, even snow. Yet at some point we began expecting a sort of white by default on our walls and in our spaces. How I’d like to imagine a darker canvas for architecture, and that the brightness of white be used sparingly.

@wenyuhall #wenyutang #文郁堂 by @jamesleng

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4 months ago

Late Spring morning first light

A square window for square film

The house gazes upon itself

Defensible space, but the grass didn’t get the memo. by @jamesleng

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5 months ago

Glacial Erratic (glacialerratic.us) is a collection of architecture-related explorations, directed by James Leng. It is a practice for built artifacts, as well as a repository for idea in photographic and written form. By invoking a specific geological phenomena, this entity orients the work through landscape, movement, time, and identity.

James is also a co-founder of @figure.office , an architectural practice focused on public and community oriented projects. Glacial Erratic then—in parallel, or in contrast—is an inward turning project, created by the necessity of respite: a space of making that is slower, softer, and more intimate. It is an identity born out of James’s time at @macdowell1907 , where ideas of entangling with the natural world eventually developed into The House of Four Ecologies.

Glacial Erratic prioritizes a reflective mode of making—towards nuance, mystery, and delight—especially in a reality that often demands pragmatism over enchantment. We seek collaborators and clients—artists, writers, naturalists—interested in creating work that is contemplative and unexpected.

Website design by @burrowlab by @jamesleng

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9 months ago

A window for a tree / Provides sunlight for / Rooms for a rock

As we start prepping the House of Four Ecologies for photo documentation this Spring and Summer, some of the objects that inspired the design are brought into superimposition on location.

Rooms for a Rock was a sculpture experiment made at my @macdowell1907 residency, the experience of was a moment of genesis for the subsequent house project.

Coincidentally, the House of Four Ecologies will also eventually become a part time art residency to embody that same spirit and pay it forward - to give artists, simply, time and space. by @jamesleng

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2 years ago

Floor plan, House of Four Ecologies

“…As a contextually responsive strategy, multiple smaller volumes become far more agile in physically navigating around the existing natural features on the site—most prominently a small cluster of windblown but healthy fir trees at its center. These four volumes dance between the trees in a delicate choreography that pays deference to their residency, taking advantage of their presence to protect from wind and frame view corridors to scenery afar.

Each of the four volumes specifically orients and captures a moment in this transitional ecological journey. The first volume tucks behind a fir tree, minimizing its presence from the street and neighbors’ views, and directs the living room westward to the ocean. The second volume emerges from the other side of the fir, featuring a sheltered courtyard screened from neighbors to the East, buffering the wind and encapsulating a small piece of the coastal groundscape for intimate viewing. The third volume contains a generous space centered around a large dining table flanked by the kitchen, opening to an outdoor deck to the West. The volume rotates towards a narrow view corridor between firs, looking to a woodland grove beyond. Finally the fourth volume houses the family room, turning yet again to face the open meadow to the North.”

- Excerpt from Design Narrative, TSRA DCEM Conceptual Design Submission, June 2022

Architecture: @juney.lee @jamesleng @hoangtnguyen @natashasadikin
Landscape: @hannahpae by @jamesleng

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2 years ago

Our House of Four Ecologies in Sea Ranch started construction last month and will be complete by this time next year. Architecture hardly seems real until you see in person the ground imprinted with the footprint of your aspirations, and the mess of it all.

Getting to this point has been odds-defying in the current economic environment. We look forward to embracing plenty of value engineering and unorthodox solutions in the days ahead. Of course all of this was only possible with @natashasadikin @juney.lee @hoangtnguyen and our illustrious landscape designer @hannahpae !

Looking forward to sharing more progress and images in the new year. taken in Sea Ranch, California by @jamesleng

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3 years ago

Tadao Ando’s Bourse de Commerce. Paris, August 2023 taken in Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection by @jamesleng

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3 years ago

Field report from Louvre Lens:

The building shimmers in an otherworldly delight, even as the weathering of 11 years hasn’t been all too kind to the aluminum panels (unclear if it’s mis-maintenance or vandalism). The landscape has grown in, or overgrown, its whimsical figurations an important complement to the stark abstraction of the building’s material form.

To my preference we arrived on an overcast weekday when the museum was mostly devoid of people, an appropriately melancholy air for a mining town, maybe.

On the interior, the aluminum unexpectedly produces a pleasant softness. I enjoyed seeing the building, its razer-thin roof beams, its impossibly flat panels, quietly wrestle with sprinkler heads and other normies insisting SANAA return to reality at once. They don’t. taken in Louvre-Lens by @jamesleng

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3 years ago

Not much to say about @atelierbrancusi other than what a dream it would be to devote life to shaping materials.

Peering through the vitrine into Brancusi’s humble skylit studio, Piano’s pavilion and Centre Pompidou join the ensemble, faintly, in the reflections.

Paris, August 2023 by @jamesleng

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3 years ago

So much gratitude to @rick.kinsel and @vilcekfoundation for inviting me and @figure.office to design a birdhouse for the Foundation. We had the pleasure of learning how to work with wood, and embrace its knots, checks, cracks over many months, alongside collaborator and fabricator Robert Rising of @nycityslab . We photographed the sculpture in the nearby woodlands of a park in Yonkers before it moved to its final home upon a rooftop. by @jamesleng

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4 years ago