The Bittertang Farm

The history of architecture is one full of amazing and hilarious opportunities. We do not intend to let any of them slip by.

Welcome to the farm, explore at your own risk and please, pet the animals.

Although trained as architects our prolific interests and methodology associates us closely to the organization of a farm. Our material is bred, coaxed and grown to yield tasty morsels, beautiful new exotic beasts and fertilizer for future growth.

  • The Bittertang Mind

    The Rococo died too young, its brilliant and short life terminated in adolescence by the militant neo-classical. Our intention is to resurrect the youthfulness of the Rococo and to continue where its practitioners left off privileging interactive pleasure, frothiness, plant and animal sourcing as well as immersive design.Our explorations of the period’s tendencies are based in digital and visceral matter with output transitioning between scales and localities leaving our traces of frothy matter in various disciplines.Read More
    Our work delves deep into traditional architectural references extracting characteristics often overlooked and relegated to other professions which we believe to be integral in the production of architectural atmosphere. Our plush toy collection is a case in point. If the Victorian era was seen as an era filled with overstuffed furniture obscuring structure and bones producing ominous environments then that furniture cannot be separated from the mood established nor can one ignore the influence that they would have on the mood of the architect. Our plush toys are an acknowledgement of the impact that pillows, upholstery and other additive pleasure components can have on architectural space. With this in mind we have produced toys that will move beyond mere accoutrement producing narratives and atmospheres initially outside of architecture. Our research into these pleasure toys will reveal novel tectonics and material lineages that will then feedback into our work at other scales and in a more traditional architectural scale. Gelatinous Orbs is a project that addresses material longevity as well as natural growth cycles to produce an exotic environment of biological fecundity. It recognizes the biological as a temporal and an accretive substance which demands dynamic forms of representation.

  • Farm vs. Firm

    We call ourselves a farm because our work propagates itself. We breed together old and new projects, historical ones as well merging various interests into one frothy concoction which is neither collage nor hybrid (since it can reproduce) nor mutant, but a whole new species with promiscuous attributes enabling it to breed with itself or impregnate other ideas.Read More
    Sometimes these projects create new beasts (either conceptually or physically) whose skins we can harvest and inflate with air to use in another project or sometimes their infants and embryo’s produce projects within themselves. To achieve this, digital form is transformed through the use of physical materials into something radically different and alive. These preemie digital forms are our digital babies, ready to be cloaked and clad in the physical world. Allowed to grow, propagate, decay and eventually seduce people to do extraordinary things such as cuddle and lick architecture. We look for architectural possibilities wherever we work, within the digital, within the physical, within materials, within history and construction processes. We try to expose ourselves to as much as we can so that our processes produce fodder for future projects.
Our work explores multiple themes including pleasure, frothiness, biological matter, animal posturing, babies, sculpture and coloration all unified through bel composto.

  • Belcomposto

    Older than the Rococo, belcomposto is the unification of multiple artistic and material endeavors to produce alternative and pleasurable environments within the built environment.Read More
    The Rococo took belcomposto to the edge melding painting, sculpture, furniture, architecture, fashion and human beings. Our explorations insert landscape, plants, and animals into the mix. An example of Rococo belcomposto would be the trompe l’oeil, which is seen as a wet painting that oozes its painted material onto bas-relief cartouches and sculpted statuary, accumulating into frothy masses at any hard seam.

  • The Pleasurable

    The orgasmic baroque feast was an event designed and constructed to enhance and encourage pleasure. Elaborate sugar sculptures and food compositions were displayed for visual as well as taste sensations.Read More
    This emphasis on the banquet loses formality as an event becoming daily life in the mid 18th century. No longer limited to carnal pleasures and temporary exhibitions, designs for both senses and intellect are applied to the rococo interior. We see the development of the hilarious as a 6th sense to be part of this transition. Encrustations in the form of putti and babies while aiding frothiness were utilized towards humorous ends often lightening the mood of previous compositions. Interior space isn’t the space of serious religion or as it is in contemporary life, serious living/recreation but a space of carnal and intellectual drama.

  • Babies

    In the past babies infiltrated buildings, filling rooms with glistening fatty globules that glide over architectural orders and bound effortlessly through space.Read More
    Looking closely at the ceilings of pre-neoclassical buildings you will see them in large puffs and accumulations; plump, awkward, strange and everywhere, these baby-like creatures bring humor and frothiness to interiors, floating wistfully around unbound by architectural or scientific conventions. Their flaccid bodies introducing moments of softness onto harder architectural forms producing soft regions of sensuality as well as opportunities for rendering more rigid architectural frameworks supple and malleable. The popularity of these troupes and their spatial and emotional implications cannot be ignored and we are exploring their relevancy to ornate environments and are extracting new baby lineages that create fantastical interior environments.

  • Biological Matter

    We are interested in the infiltration of the biological as a form of encrustation onto the spaces of the Baroque to produce an effulgent new architecture where human bodies as much as biological matter are shaped towards specific affect.Read More
    Architecture won't be built solely from crystallized and solidified materials but in coordination with living matter from bacteria to plants and new bioengineered products. Maintenance of infrastructure and building will be as much about styling, preening and tending as it is repairing and sealing.

  • Frothy Seams

    Frothy seams challenge traditional and contemporary architectonics moving mass and matter away from lines of structural support to zones of transition accumulating matter into frothy masses at seams enhancing belcomposto tendencies.Read More
    This reorganization of architectural matter enables various picturesque affects to be produced that operate outside of architectural language. One can see the nexus of frothiness in the mid 18th century as cloud and putti envy came to the fore producing permanent foam and larval coatings to domestic interiors. The cartouche develops as an architectural portal to fantasy landscapes. It becomes engorged and encrusted accumulating the detritus of the other world in thick undulating rings.

  • Animal Posturing

    We lust for beast-like qualities in inanimate beings. The logic of the beast defies the logic of the architectural.Read More
    With the discovery of the new world and its constant source of exotic species the animal silhouette was fetishized and incorporated into the domestic environment. Representations of these species in painted form wasn't enough to satiate, objects began to be transformed into exotic headless beasts themselves interiorizing and domesticating the menagerie. Objects as much as the proliferation of miniaturized dogs and pets took on lives of their own. Preferences and taste in animal husbandry and domestication where shared with cabinetmakers. Furniture and other manufactured objects were seen as fecund beings that evolved and grew through successful breeding. Personality, utility and novelty were paramount in maintaining and studding offspring.

  • Coloration

    To design with color is to not only design with mass and atmosphere but with the visceral in mind.Read More
    Rather than deal with inate material coloration, radical adjustments to a materials coloration enables the production of depth where depth doesn’t really exist. Similar to applying makeup, color can bring out or produce new features in surfaces creating new forms. When used in a painterly way, color can deny clear tectonic legibility as it moves seamlessly across materials and various geometries proposing alternate readings, figurations and implausible constructions.

  • Sculpture

    Sculpture de-emphasizes superficiality and surface treatments merging together surface, silhouette, ornamentation and space. Read More
    Contemporary architecture privileges surface and ornamentation as an outcome of contemporary tooling and representation. We assert our desire to undermine this direction through the elevation of sculpture as an underling principle in our work.
    • We focus on bringing delight and active engagement into the architectural world through material studies and the deployment of a sensibility that embraces softness and weakness.

    • The Farm

      Recently they have built 3 inflatable pavilions, a pregnant sugar oozing pinata, a plush toy collection, a sagging birdcage, a room of wax, an edible environment, and a giant rotting amphitheater.Read More
      Our work sees the future not as a depressing outcome of previous mistakes but as a future of our own creation one full of inventive and playful opportunities. We believe that technologies, materialities and our understanding of the natural world will yield beautiful new aesthetic and sustainable future work. Gelatinous Orbs and Ice Palace are studies of a possible future where volume and content are made of soft, dissolvable, water based materials that produce colorful new active worlds. The walls of ‘BEING’ are made of Vietnamese summer roll wrappers and are edible. Our inflatable and water filled work minimizes the amount of material needed to create maximum volume, utilizing tap water and air to create an architecture that can be permanent or be drained and removed by simply opening a valve. We work with these soft materials because we are interested in their affects, their tactilities and abilities to transform architecture from something rigid and hard to something soft, approachable and engaging an extension of the human body. We like to think that architecture can be something that you want to hug and relate too, not just a stiff object to be stared at.

    • Antonio & Mikeylove

      Excited by the possibilities of a future full of playful and inventive opportunities Bittertang was founded by Antonio Torres and Michael Loverich as a small design farm to bring humor and pleasure to the built environment.Read More
      Antonio Torres explores expressions and sensations through architecture and various media. He creates projects between his childhood home in rural Michoacan, Mexico, and the City of Chicago. He holds a Masters in Architecture from UCLA and has taught advanced design studios at the University of Columbia in New York, GSAPP, and technology courses internationally. He currently is an Assistant Professor and the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies at University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Architecture. View CV Michael Loverich, lives on an island where he experiments with edible and living materials. He graduated from UCLA with a Master in Architecture before working for Reiser + Umemoto followed by Snohetta. Michael has taught graduate design studios at the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and the University of Columbia in New York, GSAPP.View CV