Tronic Studio co-founders, Vivian Rosenthal and Jesse Seppi, bring architecture off the paper and onto the screen

Vivian Rosenthal and Jesse Seppi met almost ten years ago in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture. As Vivian puts it, it was a unique time in the history architecture. The dean of the college at the time was Bernard Tschumi, who was really pushing what he called “paperless studios.” “You think of an architect or an architecture student,” Rosenthal explains, “and you think of a drafting board and a pencil. But the dean was really pushing for studios where everything was done on the computer. ”

Since they met, Rosenthal and Seppi’s views on how to take on architecture has undergone a radical shift. Thinking she was going to design skyscrapers, Rosenthal became seduced by the idea of animation, because it “gives you great access to what’s in your imagination.” Something that has become a recurring theme in the duo’s work is what they’ve dubbed “synthetic manipulations,” which, to them, means technology mimicking forms in nature.

“We were of a generation that witnessed, during the most impressionable years of our lives, how the computer can be used not only as a tool for presentations, but as a tool for design,” Creative Director Seppi adds. “There’s a lot of paper architects out there who never really build, but they’re still some of the most interesting or influential—like Lebbeus Woods, for instance. People in film, for whatever reason, gravitate towards his imagery. So, architecture is an amazing foundation for a designer. It’s really rigorous and concept-driven and because of that unique time frame where we were in school being in the excitement around the digital, you start to become seduced a bit by the idea of filmmaking. That’s what happened to us and some of our contemporaries.”

Tronic Studio's campaign for Moet & Chandon in Fall 2007

“One of first ideas we were very much interested in pursuing was exploring the virtual-actual divide,” Seppi says. ”In this virtual and actual divide, we started to realize there were certain thematics that were really structuring our body of work,” Rosenthal adds, “and these were space, technology, perception, and humanity. We realized that these all culminated in an experience, and it’s this experience which can be a cross multiple of mediums and disiplines that has really fascinated us. If knowledge is acquired through experience, than we need to expose ourselves to as many experiences as possible in order to create new realties. Experience is transformative.”

VR: “When a brand comes to us, almost all the time, they’re aware of our work being fairly artistic within a commercial entity. They’re willing to take that risk, and there’s usually someone sort of visionary at the corporation that wants to do something unexpected or unusual or challenging. One of the architects working in Herzog and DeMeuron’s office knew our work and they were working on a project called “56 Leonard,” which was a  fifty-seven story residential tower down in TriBeCa. They called us and explained the project and wanted to do a film.”

JS: “There were obviously  a lot of people involved in a project like that and we went to meetings where there were people who were really in favor of an experimentation of showing a film that explains to people where the ideas come from, how the Anish Kapoor sculpture is formed by compression and we went through some different iterations. I think we had much more radical camera moves that had to be tamed a little bit but in the end we got some really interesting techniques across.”

56 Leonard

VR: “I think both of us maybe live a lot in our head or in our imagination and I think animation and film let you dream a bit more, whereas architecture is very much rooted in reality and physics and real time frames. That sort of seduction into the world of digital design is the one that felt strangely tangible even though it’s totally not a tangible medium, in that you can extract everything that’s in your head.”

From the prolific pairing of chocolate and Sony electronics pouring out of the sky above New York to create a PSP, headphones, and more, it’s our guess the seemingly endless stable of high-profile clients will continue to grow until they’re pale in comparison to the duo with the innovation of Sagmeister and rhetoric of Pericles.

A displaced H.G. Wells as a child of the 21st century paired with a MacBook comes to mind. There’s a new heavy-hitter on the design block, and they’re definitely carrying a bigger stick than you.

Apple Profile: Tronic

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