Oscar Tuazon

Oscar Tuazon (born Oscar Hansen, July 9, 1975, Indianola, WA) is a California-based artist working in architecture, installation, and sustainability. He was born in a geodesic dome his parents built on the Kitsap Peninsula — an origin story that prefigures his career-long engagement with alternative building. His Water School exhibition (MSU Broad Museum, 2019) placed Steve Baer explicitly at the origin of his practice, making Tuazon one of the clearest documented cases of Baer’s influence on contemporary art and architecture.

Background and education

Tuazon grew up on the Port Madison Reservation in Suquamish territory and has studied the Lushootseed language. He attended Deep Springs College, graduated from Cooper Union in 1999, and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2001. He took his surname from his first wife, Lan Tuazon.

Early career

Tuazon worked at Studio Acconci in 2003 and co-founded castillo/corrales, an artist-run space in Paris, in 2007. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and the Whitney Biennial in 2012, establishing a practice centered on habitable structures that blur the boundary between art and architecture. He has described “a house as the ultimate sculpture.”

Water School

Beginning in 2016, Tuazon’s ongoing Water School project builds zome-derived structures that use water as thermal mass, extending Baer’s principles into a contemporary art and pedagogical context. The project explicitly positions itself in a Fuller-to-Baer-to-Tuazon lineage.

Water School (MSU Broad Museum, through August 26, 2019) brought together a cross-section of Tuazon’s experimental architectural works, including Rocket-Stove (high-efficiency heating with near-zero smoke) and Rainbenders (2018, designed to capture water in regions with under 15 inches of rain per year). Companion schools were created in California and Minnesota (both sites of water crises — drought and the Dakota Access Pipeline, respectively). The schools create space for sustainability discussions.

Tuazon’s work has appeared at Chicago MCA, the Whitney, Centre Georges Pompidou, Art Basel, and the Venice Biennale.

Zome Alloy

Zome Alloy (2016, Art Basel) is the centerpiece and Tuazon’s most direct engagement with the passive solar lineage: a full-scale reproduction of Steve and Holly Baer‘s zome complex in Corrales, New Mexico, “inspired by Baer’s signature polygonal ‘Zome Home.’” The article credits the term “Zome Home” to Steve Durkee.

Tuazon contacted Baer directly to initiate the project; Baer warned him: “It’ll ruin your life.” The process involved a 3D survey of the actual Baer house, robotically manufactured aluminum panels, and assembly into 11 traversable polyhedral units (the article describes interconnected plywood rooms in the prototype). Steve and Holly Baer participated in person at the installation. Tuazon hosted a second “Alloy Conference” at the work, echoing Baer’s original 1969 Alloy conference.

Originally shown at Art Basel 2016 (complete structure); three rooms were shown at MSU Broad with the remaining rooms at the California and Minnesota schools. The rooms contain a library selected by Tuazon from the MSU collection, ranging across art, architecture, science, and activism. The space hosted read-ins, write-ins, and speak-ins during the exhibition.

Curtain Wall — a Beadwall variant

Tuazon’s Curtain Wall (2013, collection: The Brant Foundation): two large panes of glass in a frame; functions as a window by day; at night the cavity between the panes fills with polystyrene beads for insulation. This is functionally a Beadwall — Dave Harrison’s Zomeworks system that does exactly this, patented in the 1970s. The article does not name Beadwall or Harrison.

Baer, Fuller, and Brand as the origin triad

A room in the exhibition showed “ephemera and publications produced by the first-generation environmentalists (Steve Baer, Buckminster Fuller, and Stewart Brand) which inspired Tuazon’s own work.” Baer’s Dome Cookbook is listed first among these writings.

The article describes Baer as “the next generation” relative to Fuller, and Tuazon as “the next generation” relative to Baer — placing the lineage as Fuller -> Baer -> Tuazon.