The first thing Peter Bjorndal noticed stepping into Eugene Tssui’s fish house in Berkeley, California was that there were no corners. Not a single sharp angle anywhere in the building, from the circular windows that deflect seismic forces tangentially outward to the spiral ramp his mother requested so aging knees would never have to negotiate a staircase. Tssui is the architect who designed this structure in 1991 for his own parents, modeling its form on the tardigrade, the microscopic organism capable of surviving minus 273 degrees Celsius and boiling toxic gas. If the most indestructible creature on earth is shaped like a parabola on top and a catenary arch on the bottom, Tssui reasoned, then a house built around those same geometries might just float over an earthquake the way a boat floats over a wave. Bjorndal, a Minneapolis-based artist and musician, had spent about a year trying to figure out who this man really was before Tssui simply told him to come stay at the fish house.
A building with no corners and a bathroom light switch behind the door
The fish house is currently mid-renovation, half-gutted, and Bjorndal moved through it in the dark more than once, groping for light switches wired to unexpected places. The kitchen countertop is pink quartzite. The soffits absorb all the lighting so the rooms glow without visible fixtures. The walls are Styrofoam and reinforced concrete blocks a foot thick, giving the structure an insulation value of roughly R80. Passive ventilation runs the length of the building through a system Tssui calls nostril windows: stainless steel screen tubes that push in to seal the house and pull out to channel air through the structure and out a rear patio.
The smallest room in the house turned out to be the one guests always preferred. Bjorndal stood in it the first night and understood why immediately. It is an oddly cozy nook, low-ceilinged and curved, the kind of space that makes a person feel held rather than enclosed.
Tssui’s studio nearby held scale models of two underground buildings currently in development. One is a 2,700-square-foot residential home buried 16 feet down, topped by a geodesic porch structure and twin towers of slow-moving, bird-safe wind turbines that are completely silent. The other is a 19,000-square-foot commercial building buried 40 feet underground, cooled entirely by a nearly 40-foot waterfall at its entrance. The temperature differential the waterfall creates drives airflow through the whole structure. The ventilation system was calculated by California Polytechnic University and verified through 3D computer analysis.
Over a hundred outfits and a cape encounter with Tibetan monks on a 500-mile pilgrimage
A storage unit visit revealed what Bjorndal could only describe as the practical logic beneath the spectacle. Each cape in Tssui’s collection uses a custom harness system so the garment stays on the shoulders no matter how the arms move. The collars are engineered to direct body heat around the head. Pockets are everywhere, including interior zipper compartments he calls built-in purses, and hidden lower pockets secured under a belt. One coat is lined with actual wool sourced from Tibetan monks Tssui encountered on a pilgrimage in the mountains, monks who were wearing their own capes. He offered to make them one in exchange and asked for a mailing address. They told him they were 500 miles into a pilgrimage and had none.
He estimates there are well over a hundred outfits at home. He has been stopped on the street and asked whether he is the prime minister of a country. His father-in-law once told someone asking the same question that Tssui was a magician performing a show that evening. They believed him.
Tssui put his philosophy plainly during one of their long conversations: ‘An average cloud weighs a million pounds. So, how is this million-pound thing floating in the air? We’re surrounded by these miracles. So, there’s a possibility that we can counteract what’s going on and find solutions. And if I die trying, well, I’m going to die anyway.’
He described living in a dollar-50-a-month apartment in Montreal, working as a nightclub bouncer and a massage teacher, freezing at minus 40 degrees Celsius with no heat in the building, still drawing his architectural visions on paper. The second architecture office he ever walked into hired him on the spot after looking at those drawings. He later spent six years apprenticing under Bruce Goff, whom he describes as the most renowned American imaginative architect of his time.
Bjorndal left Berkeley with hours of recorded conversation and the distinct sense he had traveled deeper into uncertainty rather than out of it. A follow-up project is on the horizon, though by Bjorndal’s own account that means some months away.
The quote on the studio wall he did not put in the headline
A second inscription on the wall of Tssui’s studio reads: ‘Work is love made visible. The search for meaning, purpose, and accountability.’ It sits across the room from the first one, surrounded by aluminum sculpture pieces waiting to be assembled into a large hanging chandelier commissioned for a Chinatown transit station in Oakland.
The fish house still has no corners, the nostril windows still pull in the Berkeley air, and the pink quartzite counter in the kitchen catches whatever light the soffits are willing to release. Bjorndal mentioned, almost as an aside, that the one thing he genuinely hated about the building was the bathroom light switch on the first floor, hidden behind the door, discovered only by opening and closing it in the dark at 2 a.m. Tssui designed everything else with meticulous intention. That one detail he left to surprise.
