Oscar Tuazon

Oscar Tuazon (born Oscar Hansen, July 9, 1975, Indianola, WA) is an American artist whose work treats architecture and shelter as sculpture. 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.

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.”

ZOME ALLOY

Tuazon’s most direct engagement with the passive solar lineage is ZOME ALLOY (2016, Art Basel), a full-scale reproduction of Steve and Holly Baer‘s zome complex in Corrales, New Mexico. 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. 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.

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.

Full article: Oscar Tuazon

See also

• Steve Baer
• Holly Baer
• Zome
• Alloy Conference
• Buckminster Fuller