Enrique Norten of TENARQUITECTOS will be speaking on Monday October 25^th at 6pm in Higgins Hall Auditorium as keynote speaker for Latin Pratt’s Breaking Borders exhibit.

Enrique Norten, Hon. FAIA was born in Mexico City where he graduated from the Universidad Iberoamericana with a degree in architecture in 1978. He obtained a Master of Architecture from Cornell University in 1980.

In 1986 he founded TEN Arquitectos [Taller de Enrique Norten Arquitectos] in Mexico City, initiating a lifelong commitment to Architecture and Design.

Among others awards, Enrique Norten was the first Mies van der Rohe Award recipient for Latin American Architecture in 1998, and in 2007 he obtained the “Legacy Award” from the Smithsonian Institution for his contributions to the US arts and culture. In 2005 he received the “Leonardo da Vinci” World Award of Arts by the World Cultural Council. Since 1997 he is an Honorary Fellow of the AIA and a member of the CAMSAM since 1986.

Enrique Norten has lectured all over the world in a diverse array of institutions and universities.

Throughout his career, he has balanced the practice of architecture with a constant participation on international juries and award committees such as the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition in New York City.He is a regular member for the Holcim Foundation Awards for Sustainable Construction, the Deutsche Bank’s Board of Trustees and for the Zumtobel Group Award for Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment. On successive years he has become a board member of the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York and the Americas Society/Council of the Americas.

Enrique Norten holds the Miller Chair at the University of Pennsylvania since 1998. He has held the Lorch Professor of Architecture Chair at the University of Michigan, the O’Neal Ford Chair in Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin; he has been the Eliot Noyes Visiting Design Critic at Harvard University and the Distinguished Visiting Professor at Cornell University. He was professor of architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City from 1980 to1990 and was coordinator of the Graduate Urban design Program from 1983 to 1985.

^tenarchitectos

Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au will be speaking on Tuesday October 18^th at 6pm in Higgins Hall Auditorium.

As one of the co-founders of the world-renowned COOP HIMMELB(L)AU, architect Wolf Prix has won numerous prestigious awards for his structures as well as a host of other awards for his teaching. The firm’s latest projects include the European Central Bank and Denmark’s House of Music and Munich’s Pavilion 21 Mini-Opera Space.

Wolf D. Prix, born in Vienna in 1942, is a co-founder of COOP HIMMELB(L)AU. he studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology, the Architectural Association of London, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles.

In 1993, Wolf D. Prix was named professor for Archiecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. Since 2003, he has been head of the Institute for Architecture, the head of Studio Prix, and serves as vice-rector of the university.

He taught as a visiting professor at the architectural Association in London in 1984, and at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1990. From 1985 to 1995, Wolf D. Prix was active as Adjunct Professor at the SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. Since 1998, he has been a faculty member at Columbia University in New York. In 1999, Wolf D. Prix was awarded the Harvey S. Perloff Professorship at The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). In 2001, he was made an adjunct professor at UCLA. Since 2001 he has been a DOctor Honoris Causa de la Univesidad de Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

^coophimmelb(l)au

Los Angeles floats its landmarks on a sea of faceless highway, like peanuts in peanut brittle. Downtown, the two-block stretch of Grand Avenue that straddles the 101 is a satisfying bite. In a single chomp, you get Frank Gehry’s Disney concert hall, Rafael Moneo’s Our Lady of the Angels cathedral, and now, a new arts high school designed by Wolf Prix and Coop Himmelb(l)au.

It’s familiar territory for Prix. He studied at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in L.A. after stints at the Architectural Association in London and the Technische Universität in Vienna, his hometown.

L.A.’s brash exuberance suits him. One of Prix’s first projects with Coop Himmelb(l)au, the studio he co-founded in 1968, was a house in London with a roof pulled airborne by a giant balloon. He has fun with architecture—get put on hold calling his Vienna office and “Gimme Shelter” is the muzak—so if anyone could help flip the trend of institutionalized cement-gray high schools distinguishable only by the mascot on the marquee out front, it’s Prix.

Completed in October, the Central Los Angeles Area High School #9 is a pile of stainless-steel building blocks: a cone for the library, a lopsided pyramid for the main lobby, and a spiraling tower that echoes Moneo’s bell tower across the highway. A 950-seat public theater connects to the lobby, and four classroom buildings circle a central courtyard in a swirl of private and public space. The school looks stunning, glinting metallic in the SoCal sun across from Moneo’s earthy concrete walls—an impressive addition for traffic-jammed commuters to gawk at in this section of the city.

^archrecord

Links:

• artdirectory
• kettererkunst

Peter Bohlin of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson will be speaking on Monday October 16^th at 6pm in Higgins Hall Auditorium.

If you find Apple stores invigorating then you won’t want to miss their designer’s presentation. Peter Bohlin is an American architect and the winner of the 2010 Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a founding principal of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson.

Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, founded in 1965, has offices in Wilkes-Barre, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Seattle and San Francisco. The firm’s work is known for exceptional design, for its commitment to the particularity of place and user, and for an extraordinary aesthetic based on a quiet rigor which is both intellectual and intuitive.

The firm’s work ranges greatly in scale and circumstance. Its architecture is alive to the subtleties of place — man-made or natural, to the varied natures of people, to the sensibilities of individuals, to the character of institutions, and to the rich possibilities of materials and the means of construction.

Bohlin Cywinski Jackson has received more than 490 regional, national and international awards for design. In 1994, the practice received the Architecture Firm Award from the American Institute of Architects. The firm’s work is published regularly in professional journals worldwide.

^bohlincywinskijackson

“The poignancy of the natural landscape,” says Peter Bohlin, acts as a primary stimulus to the architecture for which his firm has become internationally known. “We strive to create extraordinary places that fit, as well, the nature of each of our clients.” Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, a 42-year-old practice that has grown to 150 people and five offices—Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania, Seattle and San Francisco—has been at the forefront of the “green” movement in building. “We’ve always viewed sustainable design as not only the right thing to do but also an opportunity to make richer and more powerful architecture,” Bohlin comments, noting the “innovations and increasing possibilities in the palette of materials”—largely wood, glass and steel—that he uses.

The firm has received more than 300 design awards for an aesthetic based on a quiet rigor that is equal parts intellectual and intuitive. The 1994 Architecture Firm Award given by the AIA cited Bohlin Cywinski Jackson’s scope of practice and body of work; that work continues to range in scale and building type from major institutional structures to the Apple stores worldwide to a collection of private residences. “Our goal on every project is to encompass both the practical and emotional elements of architecture in a sensitive response to the particular environment and circumstance.”

^architecturaldigest

Links:

• archdaily _ interview
• architecturalrecord
• wikipedia

Wednesday November 10th at 3pm Pratt Institute School of Architecture will host architect Frank Gehry in Memorial Hall. Doors open at 2:15 for Pratt ID holders, 2:45 for general public (space permitting).

Frank Gehry established his practice in Los Angeles, California in 1962. The Gehry partnership, Gehry Partners, LLP, was formed in 2001 and currently supports a staff of over 120 people. Gehry Partners employs a large number of senior architects who have extensive experience in the technical development of building systems and construction documents, and who are highly qualified in the management of complex projects.

Every project undertaken by Gehry Partners is designed personally and directly by Frank Gehry. All of the resources of the firm and the extensive experience of the firm’s partners are available to assist in the design effort and to carry this effort forward through technical development and construction administration. The firm relies on the use of Digital Project, a sophisticated 3D computer modeling program originally created for use by the aerospace industry, to thoroughly document designs and to rationalize the bidding, fabrication, and construction processes.

The partners in Gehry Partners, LLP are: Frank Gehry, Brian Aamoth, Terry Bell, John Bowers, Edwin Chan, Jennifer Ehrman, Berta Gehry, Meaghan Lloyd, Tensho Takemori, Laurence Tighe & Craig Webb.

http://www.foga.com/

“BROOKLYN, N.Y., October 29, 2010 – Renowned architect Frank Gehry will speak as part of the Pratt Institute School of Architecture’s fall 2010 lecture and events series at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, November 10, 2010, in Memorial Hall Auditorium on Pratt’s Brooklyn Campus. The event is free and open to the public, however, seating priority will be given to Pratt students and faculty members with valid ID at 2:30 p.m. Members of the public will be admitted at 2:50 p.m. should seating be available.

Gehry will converse with Julie Iovine, executive editor of The Architect’s Newspaper, and Yael Reisner, author of “Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about a Troubled Relationship” (Wiley, 2010), which is based on 16 interviews Reisner conducted with some of the world’s most creative designers, including Gehry, on their beliefs, experiences, and position on aesthetics. The 16 designers discuss their formative experiences, creative processes and motivations, and whether they think that beauty is integral or nonessential to architecture.

Gehry’s notable projects include the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles; and the “Dancing House” building, Prague. He received the Pritzker Prize, the world’s most prestigious architecture award, in 1989.

Recent projects include the Barclays Center sports arena in Brooklyn; 8 Spruce Street, a 76-story skyscraper in New York; a concert hall for the New World Symphony in Miami Beach; and another branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi. Most ambitious of all is the massive Grand Street project, a plan to entirely remake the thoroughfare leading from Los Angeles City Hall to Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Over the years, Gehry has lent his designs to a number of products outside the field of architecture, including the Wyborovka Vodka bottle, a wristwatch for Fossil, jewelry for Tiffany & Co., and the World Cup of Hockey trophy. In 2005, the architect and his work were the subject of a feature-length documentary film, “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” by director Sydney Pollack.

Gehry established his practice in Los Angeles in 1962. The Gehry partnership, Gehry Partners, LLP, was formed in 2001 and currently supports a staff of over 120 people.”

^quoted text

Pratt Institute School of Architecture will host the symposium “Voyage Through Le Corbusier” on Monday, October 11 from 6 to 9 pm in conjuction with the “Le Corbusier – Miracle Boxes” exhibition. It will include presentations by Kenneth Frampton, Mary McLeod, Jose Oubrerie, Stanislaus von Moos, Deborah Gans, and Ivan Shumkov who will speak about their research on the work of Le Corbusier and his legacy which goes far beyond the fields of architecture and art in suggesting a plan for radical social change. After the individual presentations, the symposium participants will gather for a round table discussion and public Q&A session.

Pratt Institute School of Architecture and the Pratt Library will present “Le Corbusier – Miracle Boxes”, a multidisciplinary, three-part exhibition on the work of renowned Swiss-French architect, urbanist, designer, writer, and painter Le Corbusier (born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), who is considered by many to be the most important architect of the 20th century, starting August 30, 2010. “Miracle Boxes,” the first New York exhibition dedicated entirely to the work of Le Corbusier, is curated by Ivan R. Shumkov, Ph.D., adjunct associate professor of architecture at Pratt Institute.

On view through October 15, 2010 in the atrium and in The Hazel and Robert Siegel Gallery of Higgins Hall, the exhibition’s architectural portion will provide an in-depth look at more than 50 of Le Corbusier’s public buildings, including all his exhibition pavilions, museums, theaters, cultural centers, monuments, and temples. Original editions of such seminal works as Vers un Architecture, Precisions, Le Modulor, and Le Corbusier Oeuvre Complete will be on display in the Pratt Library through November 20, 2010.  In addition, a timeline of the projects displayed in Higgins Hall will accompany the book display, providing exhibition attendees with a comprehensive view of Le Corbusier’s work over time.

To give Pratt students, faculty, and visitors an opportunity to experience one of Le Corbusier’s visions first-hand, the exhibition will also include the Miracle Box: a full-scale construction based on Le Corbusier’s smallest architectural project, or a “working cell” that was originally located inside his Atelier in Paris. The exterior façades will feature a selection of the symbols published in Le Corbusier’s books, which, while not part of the original design, further represent Le Corbusier’s work. The project is currently on view outside the Pratt Library, and will be installed in the lobby of the Library as part of its permanent collection following the exhibition.

For more information on the exhibition, lecture, and symposium surrounding “Le Corbusier- Miracle Boxes,” please visit http://www.miracleboxes.com.

The exhibition and symposium are made possible in part with generous support from Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.

Pratt to Present Three-Part Exhibition, Lecture, and Symposium LE CORBUSIER-MIRACLE BOXES, curated by Prof. Ivan R. Shumkov, PhD. Opening Lecture and Reception on Sept. 13, 6pm Higgins Hall Auditorium and Siegel Gallery. **

Pratt Institute School of Architecture and the Pratt Library will present “Le Corbusier – Miracle Boxes”, a multidisciplinary, three-part exhibition on the work of renowned Swiss-French architect, urbanist, designer, writer, and painter Le Corbusier (born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), who is considered by many to be the most important architect of the 20th century, starting August 30, 2010. “Miracle Boxes,” the first New York exhibition dedicated entirely to the work of Le Corbusier, is curated by Ivan R. Shumkov, Ph.D., adjunct associate professor of architecture at Pratt Institute. Shumkov will deliver an opening lecture that will be followed by a reception on September 13, 2010 at 6 p.m in Higgins Hall Auditorium located at 61 St. James Place in Brooklyn. The exhibition, opening lecture, reception, and an upcoming related symposium will be free and open to the public.

On view through October 15, 2010 in the atrium and in The Hazel and Robert Siegel Gallery of Higgins Hall, the exhibition’s architectural portion will provide an in-depth look at more than 50 of Le Corbusier’s public buildings, including all his exhibition pavilions, museums, theaters, cultural centers, monuments, and temples. Original editions of such seminal works as Vers un Architecture, Precisions, Le Modulor, and Le Corbusier Oeuvre Complete will be on display in the Pratt Library through November 20, 2010.  In addition, a timeline of the projects displayed in Higgins Hall will accompany the book display, providing exhibition attendees with a comprehensive view of Le Corbusier’s work over time.

To give Pratt students, faculty, and visitors an opportunity to experience one of Le Corbusier’s visions first-hand, the exhibition will also include the Miracle Box: a full-scale construction based on Le Corbusier’s smallest architectural project, or a “working cell” that was originally located inside his Atelier in Paris. The exterior façades will feature a selection of the symbols published in Le Corbusier’s books, which, while not part of the original design, further represent Le Corbusier’s work. The project is currently on view outside the Pratt Library, and will be installed in the lobby of the Library as part of its permanent collection following the exhibition.

Pratt Institute School of Architecture will also host the symposium “Voyage through Le Corbusier” on Monday, October 11 from 6 to 9 p.m. in conjunction with the “Le Corbusier – Miracle Boxes” exhibition. It will include presentations by scholars Kenneth Frampton, Mary McLeod, Jose Oubrerie, Stanislaus von Moos, Deborah Gans, and Ivan Shumkov who will speak about their research on the work of Le Corbusier and his legacy – which goes far beyond the fields of architecture and art in suggesting a plan for radical social change. After the individual presentations, the symposium participants will gather for a round table discussion and public question-and-answer session.

For more information on the exhibition, lecture, and symposium surrounding “Le Corbusier- Miracle Boxes,” please visithttp://www.miracleboxes.com.

The exhibition and symposium are made possible in part with generous support from Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.

**PLEASE ALSO NOTE THAT AT THE RECEPTION THE NEW INPROCESS15 WILL BE AVAILABLE TO STUDENTS AND FACULTY WITH I.D.

Francois ROCHE of the Paris firm Sie(n) and a Professor at Columbia will be lecturing tomorrow evening, October 15^th at 6pm in the Higgins Hall auditorium.

Francois Roche is a French architect whose firm, R&Sie, is aptly pronounced “heresy.” Among his brainchildren is Dusty Relief, an edifice under construction in Bangkok which is surrounded by electrically charged wire that “grows fur” by statically attracting airborne filth. He has also conceived stealth habitats, hypothetical communities hidden from regulators and critics by vast sheets of camo netting. Architects are supposed to draw up plans, erect structures, and finish on time and under budget. Roche is exploring what happens when the usual constraints are allowed to fall away and things get wild and loose.

As a master of conceptual architecture, Roche likes to collaborate with installation artists. This tactic allows him to avoid hidebound European safety regulations when he proposes, for instance, a steel footbridge whose design, sketched using industry-standard CAD software, has been radically distorted by a computer virus. Ask Europeans to cross a buggy footbridge and they’ll balk, quail, and consult the 80,000 regulatory pages of the EU’s acquis communautaire. Tell them it’s art, and they’ll flock to it in droves, sit on it, and drink Beaujolais nouveau.

Roche’s latest project will appear in museums in Paris and Antwerp over the next three years. Titled I’ve Heard About Node 1, it’s as audacious as architecture’s peaks of weirdness in the ’60s; say, the Suitaloon, a combination garment and dwelling proposed by Michael Webb of the London hipster firm Archigram. And yet Roche’s scheme is not just fun to think about, but eerily plausible. He’s exploiting ideas that make perfect sense in computer-driven fabrication but have never been applied to architecture. Imagine a building where the needs and desires of its inhabitants are hot-wired to the shapes of walls and floors, which can be extended and updated ad hoc, ad infinitum.

That’s Node 1. It’s an idea for a building, yes, but it lacks most of the usual architectural accoutrements: blueprints, material suppliers, subcontractors. Instead, Roche imagines a programmable assembly device dubbed the “viab,” a construction robot capable of improvising as it assembles walls, ducts, cables, and pipes.

A viab would produce structures that are not set and specific, but impermanent and malleable – merely viable – made of a uniform, recyclable substance like adobe. The automaton’s output would have no innate design, boundaries, or service life. It would take whatever form was called for at the moment – a great rotting blooming stony bubble of a building that, unlike all previous forms of human habitation, would be unplanned, responsive, densely monitored, massively customized, and rock-solid, with all modern conveniences.

The closest thing to a viab today is a small, modest mud-working robot invented by Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of engineering at the University of Southern California. Khoshnevis’ “contour crafter” works more or less like a 3-D printer, but it’s meant to assemble whole buildings. Its nozzle spits wet cement while a programmable trowel smoothes the goo into place. Roche encountered Khoshnevis, and his agile imagination immediately started pushing the idea toward its limits.

The concept isn’t as alien as it may seem; nature has been doing something similar for eons. Termites build skyscrapers by spitting and smoothing mud, then removing the structure if it gets in the way. A mound is shaped by the activity of the society within it. Roche imagines his viab as a busy termite with a body full of wet cement. It crawls ceaselessly across the structure, spewing new form and gnawing out old form, obeying an algorithm directly linked to the needs of the people inside.

It can also work without people entirely. The moon or Mars would be a natural venue for the concept, a place too hostile for mankind, where viabs could work around the clock: Let robots spit out a city, then settle in when it’s ready.

It might be a long time before a scheme this weird is realized. But suppose it is. Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” He was thinking about how nations evolve over generations, but in Node 1, those processes would play out once a week. The old brick-and-mortar rules would be gone, as though the crowded playa at Burning Man were to raise up mud castles rivaling the Transamerica Pyramid.

Do we need a capacity like that? It’s impossible to say, because the notion is genuinely heretical. It’s not every day that an age-old discipline like architecture coughs up an anomaly that’s unthinkable. This is one of those fine moments.

text via wired mag

We are pleased to be able to share the profile on Dr.Haresh Lalvani of Pratt Institute that was originally posted on core.form-ula Dr.Lalvani has spent the last 30+ years building an incredibly rich body of work that has pushed design to new limits.   Dr.Lalvani has been working on many ideas through out his career, this a small percentage of this work within this profile.  Over the course of the next few weeks, they will introduce some more experimental work coming out his Morph Studio and Milgo-Bufkin and you will be able to see it on core.from-ula.

At the Morphology Studio,  the intersection between design and technology is dealt with everyday to create new architectural surfaces and spaces that can be realized, not just imagined.  The ability of the Morph Studio to prototype ideas is a unique opportunity, one that we all strive for as designers to have.

I have been very lucky to have taken his Pratt studios and be involved with his Morph Studio since 1998;  I know many of the generations of Pratt students alike have been greatly influence by his teachings as well. Enjoy>

10D Quasi-crystalline Model (1985-86), with Pratt students

5D Hyper-grid System (1987, 1998)

(Text by Haresh Lalvani; excerpted from the AD book The Organic Approach to Architecture, eds. Deborah Gans and Zehra Kuz, 2003, Wiley-Academy))

Genomic Architecture

Genomic architecture is based on the manipulation of the architectural genome. Like its biological counterpart, this genome is universal and encompasses all architecture — past, present and future. At its root, this genome is defined by a unified morphological genome, a universal code for all morphologies — natural, human-made and artificial. Morphogenomics, a possible new science, deals with morphological informatics. It includes mapping the morphological genome as a basis for generative morphologies that underlie the shaping of architectural space and structure. Once mapped, the morphological genome will need to be layered with other genomes (also requiring mapping) to cover different aspects of architecture: physical (e.g. materials, construction technologies), sensorial, cognitive and behavioral. Genomic architecture, based on the layered genome, encompasses an integrated world of “artificial architecture” (used in the same sense as “artificial intelligence” and “artificial life”), a world of complexity evolving in parallel with the natural world. It is a morphologically structured network of information that determines architectural taxonomies and phylogenies, permits digital manipulation of form in the design process, and enables mass-customization in digital manufacturing.

Limits of Organic Architecture

The meaning of the term “organic architecture”, which draws its inspiration mostly from biology, keeps evolving with increasing knowledge of nature combined with foreseeable technologies. As new technologies emerge, architecture becomes more organic in its scope, intent and realization. The upper limit to this sort of bio-mimicry would be biology itself. Buildings would grow , respond, adapt and recycle, they would self-assemble and self-organize, they would remember and be self-aware, they would evolve, and they would reproduce and die. Organic architecture, were it to attain biology, would design itself. It would also perpetuate itself. Architecture would then become “life”, and paradoxically, buildings would no longer need architects. Organic architecture, in this limit case scenario, would also define the end of architecture (as we define it now).

11D Portion of the Morphoverse (Morphological Universe).

Extrapolating from projected technologies of the future , a scenario like this one is quite possible, even inevitable, but it is flawed for two reasons. First, biology as a goal for organic architecture assumes that such a biology (namely, existing biology) is frozen in time since it is based on “life” as we know it presently. Extrapolation of architecture from present biology ignores past and future biologies. Nature’s ongoing experiment comprises structures that are extinct, structures that exist now, and structures that have yet to appear. The definition of ‘organic’ must thus encompass all biologies: past, present and the future. Second, it ignores the creation of the new, e.g. new materials (new chemistries) not found in nature, new technologies not found in nature and new organisms (based on known or new biologies) not existing in nature. Besides new natural biologies, the term ‘organic’ must thus include artificial biology as well. This is where the line between human designs and those made by nature becomes a continuum.
Unifying Laws

What unites the natural and the human-made (including the artificial) are fundamental laws, the laws of nature. Our knowledge of nature and human-made constructions evolves such that these laws become increasingly more encompassing, tending towards the natural upper limit of a single unifying law for everything (as in the current search in physics, for example). Whether this limit is attainable is an open question. The natural and the artificial are facets of organic architecture that are joined at this fundamental level. This is true of biology and buildings. The morphologic possibilities within these two worlds fall within a single morphological universe governed by unifying laws of form that are common to both. It is governed by the mathematics of space, structure and form. When physical constraints (size, material, movement, weight, stability, building method or forming process, etc.) are imposed on form, this universe shrinks through the elimination of mathematical structures that are physically unrealizable. The physics and chemistry of form delimits the morphological universe.

(an excerpt of lecture given by Haresh Lalvani at the Noguchi Museum, 2005; Video by Victor Acevedo)

The expensive–and comparatively slow–press brake machine could be made obsolete by Milgo/Bufkin’s AlgoRhythms Technologies. Photo:Robert Polidori for Metropolis

The computerized water jet cutter (above) and the laser cutter, some of the factory’s sophisticated fabricating tools. Photo: Robert Polidori for Metropolis

Following is the article from Metropolis magazine, June 2003, describing Lalvani’s collaboration with Milgo,

Bend the Rules of Structure
A Brooklyn metalworking shop with an unlikely name may hold the key to 21st-century shapemaking.

By Peter Hall

As company names go, Milgo/Bufkin sounds almost Dickensian. Pushing open the hefty rust-coated steel door of the company headquarters, I half expect to be greeted by a scrawny Mr. Milgo and a plump Mr. Bufkin, with polished bald heads and prominent nose hairs. The truth is almost as good. The Milgo/Bufkin factory, founded in 1916 in a toxic corner of industrial Brooklyn, is where the drawings and doodles of designers and sculptors are turned into palpable reality. It is the art-and-architecture world’s little secret.

The chief of this family-owned business is not a Milgo or a Bufkin, but Bruce Gitlin, who offers a hearty handshake and speaks in an accelerated voluminous manner as if someone might be about to interrupt him. “The name never meant anything to me,” he says, adding that Milgo/Bufkin is a fabrication (appropriately enough), a conflation of an off-the-shelf company name Milgo Industrial and Bufkin Enterprises, named after all the first initials of his children, nephews, and nieces. In the last 40 years the firm has built work for the whole canon of art sculptors: Donald Judd, Claes Oldenberg, Jeff Koons, Richard Serra, Robert Indiana, and Matthew Barney. It has fabricated the metalwork in some of New York’s best-known lobbies, entrance doors, and facades–including Tiffany’s, Bloomingdales, Lever House, Trump Tower, the Ford Foundation–and that large number “9″ outside 9 West 57th Street. And this is only the beginning of the tour.

AlgoRhythm Wall System (lacquer finished steel) Photo:Milgo

Gitlin is about to show me a project that he believes will “change all manufacturing in the world.” The brain behind the manufacturer’s bravado waits in the company boardroom–a scholarly figure with a salt-and-pepper beard and a scrutinizing bespectacled gaze. Haresh Lalvani is a professor of architecture at Pratt Institute and a self-described “architect-morphologist.” Together Lalvani and Gitlin have invented AlgoRhythms, a bad pun but a unique initiative involving some large bending machines, a grand theory, and, well, the future of architecture.

AlgoRhythms describes a method for folding a single sheet of metal into complex and elaborate forms, based on Lalvani’s calculations. By way of introduction, Lalvani borrows a sheet of paper from my notebook. The structural engineer Robert Le Ricolais, he explains, established that “by crushing structures we reveal what they want to become.” Lalvani rolls the sheet of paper into a cylinder and then strikes it sharply at the top with the heel of his hand. The cylinder crumples at the center, creating several apparently random folds. To Lalvani these are not random, but the key to the underlying deep nature of structure. “Any skin under some sort of force wants to take on a natural pattern,” he says. “These patterns have some morphological laws. We are working with that idea and applying it to metal.”

The first AlgoRhythms prototypes are arranged around the table and propped against the walls of the studio. There is a ceiling panel of rippling steel, an undulating wall panel, and a series of steel maquettes of column covers that curve and flow in waves. Though the twisting metal might remind one of the by now near merchandised signature of Frank Gehry, they’re not derived from one man’s intuitive sense of proportion or aesthetics but generated from algorithms based on Lalvani’s architectural “genetic code.”

AlgoRhythm Wall (computer rendering)

For more than 30 years Lalvani has located his career at the intersection of architecture, nature, and higher mathematics, where, he says, he is working to “decode the architectural genome” and discover the elemental principles underlying natural and artificial form. In other words, DNA, nature’s building blocks, has a counterpart in the artificial world that can be used to generate structures. Thrust across the meeting table is one of Lalvani’s many diagrams of these structures, showing progressive variations–in several dimensions–of the Buckyball, the 60-atom carbon molecule shaped like a soccer ball (named by scientists after R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes). Lalvani began identifying such variations on a theme at Pratt in the early 1970s, and in the early ’80s he developed a code for generating variations of Islamic motifs. At Milgo/

Bufkin he has applied automatic shape making to metal manufacturing. Setting out to modulate a stiff metal surface into several rigid curved surfaces without weakening the material, Lalvani developed a series of algorithmically generated geometries. These were then translated (by a former student, Neil Katz) into computer models and fed into computer-controlled machinery that marks and laser cuts sheet metal and readies it for folding (which is currently done manually).

Gitlin holds up a large piece of metal with corrugated curves. “I can only do this with the formulas that Haresh gives me,” he says. “There’s a whole new body of shapes and forms that have come out of his work that allows us to do things that have never been seen before. It’s opened up the design palette enormously.”

AlgoRhythm Wall (lacquer finished steel) Photo:Milgo

Lalvani does not stop there. He argues that if his artificial genetic code were to be combined with biological or physical building processes, buildings could eventually be “grown” into any desired shape. Architecture would be able to design itself. Lalvani is not the first theorist to propose self-generating buildings. His Pratt colleague William Katavolos introduced the idea of growing architecture more than 40 years ago in his book Organics, and more recently architect John Johansen has proposed that with molecular engineering atoms can be encoded with shape information that would permit controlled self-production. But Lalvani appears to be the first to provide a systematic means for this to happen, by borrowing from biology the conceptual model of the genome. This presumptuous adaptation would strike some scientists as audacious, pointless, or even insane. Mathematicians would not be troubled by using algorithms to generate forms, but might balk at the idea of Lalvani’s “hyperuniverse of form,” where all patterns are indexed within a unified database. Indeed wading through one of Lalvani’s papers, replete with his idiosyncratic phrases–his “architectural genome” and “morphological universe”–can be a bewildering experience. But Lalvani has done some homework. Loren Day, a virologist and research professor at New York University School of Medicine, met Lalvani recently and was surprised by the extent of his understanding of molecular biology. “I must say Haresh is very familiar with much of the work being done in viruses,” Day says, adding that Lalvani’s knowledge of the morphology of viruses, most of which are structured like Buckyballs, led him to the concept. As for the validity of applying the genome to artificial forms, Day offers cautious confidence. “I wouldn’t say it’s valid, but it’s very useful as a broad concept–the idea that one can break down forms into their elemental components, which are the building blocks. If I understand it correctly, you apply simple rules to these building blocks and generate remarkably diverse structures. And Haresh is doing just that.”

Algo-Ceilings

Whether or not Lalvani’s AlgoRhythms are the first pillars of a self-constructing citadel, they have immediate potential to structural engineers like Vincent DeSimone, whose firm has worked on a number of Gehry buildings. “If you take a piece of steel and bend it, it gets an inherent strength out of the geometry of the bend,” DeSimone says. “A lot of times when you want to make a warped surface in metal you literally have to stretch it. Lalvani’s algorithms have given you a method where, by folding along perforations, the metal is never stretched.” The distinction between AlgoRhythms and the sculptural steel surfaces of Gehry’s building, DeSimone says, is that “Gehry’s is a free-form surface; Haresh’s is a 3-D solids model.” At Gehry’s new Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, at Bard College, for example, the undulating stainless-steel roof functions as a rain and snow shield, but the load is carried by a series of ribs underneath–the “real roof,” as DeSimone puts it. With Lalvani’s technique, in theory an entire building could be made of load-bearing folded metal.

Algo-Ceilings

The difficulty with using metal for structure is that it has a tendency to perform badly in the intense heat of a fire. DeSimone proposes filling the folded metal forms with concrete. “The panel would be an external form of reinforcing,” he says. “You could come up with a designer’s dream, which would be an exposed structural-steel metal building.” He adds, “I can see walking into a building where the lowest structural columns are magnificently folded pieces of titanium and they’re real: the titanium is not just an appliqué but integral to the strength of the concrete.”

Algo-Structures

Gitlin drives me in his Range Rover toward the Milgo/Bufkin “art shop,” where the AlgoRhythms are fabricated. Through the car windows are the bleak industrial hinterlands of Brooklyn, which have been stamped out of once fecund farmland by a succession of manufacturing industries. Shipbuilding gave way to printing, pottery, glass, ironworks, and finally, oil. When a refinery opened in Greenpoint in 1867 and began draining its refuse into the nearby creeks, the local fish and blue crabs promptly expired, as did most traces of organic life. It seems ironic that the molecular structure of nature might now provide the key to the future of the built environment.

Gitlin’s Russian immigrant grandfather founded the company as a wooden carriage-making shop in 1916. That business dwindled, and the firm, then named Builtwell, turned to making horse-drawn wagons, which were shortly thereafter eclipsed by the motor car. After the depression the firm switched to making truck bodies, another tough business. Gitlin says his grandfather would collect overdue payment armed with a crowbar. When his father took over, most truck buyers were Italian-Americans, and many of his customers seemed to have Mafia connections. In 1963 Gitlin walked in, age 21, armed with a metallurgical engineering degree, and told his father to dump the lot and move into high-end architectural metalwork and art fabrication. “I had no customers–no work–but my father believed in me,” Gitlin recalls. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but we changed the whole business.”

Algo-Structures (truss)

We arrive at an intersection outside the art shop, an area Rem Koolhaas might call “junkspace.” Across the street is Gotcha Auto Salvage and Acme Steel Doors. The art shop is a nondescript brick warehouse building with a giant billboard on its roof, positioned for the benefit of drivers on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, which roars overhead. The word Milgo is daubed crudely in paint above the door.

Stepping through the door, however, is like entering a fantastical grotto of shining steel, bronze, and oxyacetylene. A technician is filing a small bronze sculpture. Sparks fly from the dark corners of the shop. Shoved against a grille-covered window is a steel tree with perfect shining petals. A packing crate lying casually on the floor bears the stenciled letters “JUDD–RED COPPER PROGRESSION 1985.” As we move toward the back of the shop Gitlin points out a 15-foot-high John Romandi piece named Pyre, and introduces me to the head of the art shop, a looming figure with an iron handshake. Alex Kveton showed up at Milgo/Bufkin’s door one day in 1983, according to Gitlin, and said, “I’m here to work for Milgo.” A renowned sculptor in Czechoslovakia, Kveton and his wife had fled the country and come to Greenpoint with only one goal: a job at Milgo/Bufkin. Gitlin asked how he knew about the firm. “Everybody knows about Milgo,” Kveton said. “I read the art magazines.”

Kveton continues to work as a sculptor (a metal headless horseman currently sits in the shop waiting to be shipped to its client, the town of Sleepy Hollow) but is also responsible for turning Lalvani’s research ideas into metal. I ask him what was the biggest challenge of the AlgoRhythms project. “Figuring out how to make it,” he says bluntly.

Algo-Umbrellas

Lined up side by side, the full-size 12-foot-high AlgoRhythms columns begin to reveal their power as mutable forms. They make a curious platoon, twisting and rippling like some sort of dramatized baroque rebuttal of the machine age’s claim to a rectilinear world. But I am struck by how easily Lalvani and Gitlin’s grand project might be limited by this array of curving steel, how Milgo/Bufkin might be pigeonholed as providers of fancy metal coverings, the stamped tin ceiling of the twenty-first century.

Lalvani is anxious that his work not be portrayed as the development of trendy shapes; this is an entire system for generating infinitely variable form. Like Fuller before him, he cleaves to the idea that when science begins to mimic nature at a molecular level, it moves into a realm outside of fashion. When I raise the possibility that AlgoRhythms might be a victim of architecture’s fickle aesthetics, he protests: “How can you say that life will become outdated?” He concedes that “there’s a danger that if we restrict ourselves to metal it will have a certain life span–and that’s purely circumstantial.” He adds, “This is just one case study.”

Algo-Walls

Lalvani and Gitlin are already at work on another project they refer to as “universal skin.” Though reluctant to divulge details, they hint at a technique whereby any sheet material can be morphed and expanded into any shape following Lalvani’s algorithms. At the more speculative end of his design work, Lalvani has rendered entire virtual environments of morphologically encoded structures. A Column Museum proposes a space filled with a sampling of all possible architectural columns past, present, and future, arranged as physical display or in virtual space with numerous entrance and exit points. The dazzling Waveknot proposes opaque corrugated glass-and-metal modules forming an undulating surface defined by a simple knot, such that the surface becomes both inside and out.

Algo-Columns

In five years, Lalvani says, enough of the morphological genome will be mapped and the project will have a strong enough scientific foundation to make it publicly available to other researchers to help advance. “First I want to make sure it has a foundation,” he says. “When it’s grounded in mathematics, you’re not just giving an opinion.”

The project certainly won’t fail for lack of conviction. When Gitlin was first introduced to Lalvani by his friend and colleague John Lobell in 1996, Gitlin listened to Lalvani for “about five minutes,” he says, and knew he was ready to collaborate. Gitlin’s next hurdle, however, is to finance the manufacture of machinery that can mass-produce–or mass-customize, rather–the AlgoRhythms. So far most of the project has been funded out of Milgo/Bufkin’s coffers. One scheme received additional support from Pratt and a two-year grant from NYSTAR (New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research). Gitlin is discussing partnerships with two research-heavy universities. The result, he imagines, would be a giant “organic machine” capable of producing sections, seats, cars, even tunnels.

Lobell adds that mass customization will present designers with the ultimate ideal: “The designer logs in, sees an image on-screen, starts pulling and distorting it with the mouse to get exactly what he wants, clicks, and the design goes straight to a laser cutter. It’s FedExed to him the next day.” As for the fashionable nature of the project’s implied themes, Lobell–an architect–has no qualms. “The current demand of the profession is for curves,” he says ironically.

Algo-Curtain Wall

Alicia Imperiale, an architectural theorist and author of New Flatness: Surface Tension in Digital Architecture, believes there is a link between Lalvani’s work at Milgo and the architecture of Herzog and de Meuron, Greg Lynn, and Foreign Office Architecture (notably their Yokohama Terminal project). Lalvani, she notes, has arrived on similar terrain from a different starting place. “He has found a logic between morphological change–the way something looks–and how it performs,” Imperiale says. “Because of his understanding of the fluid dynamics of surface, he’s able to manipulate that and use the forces to let it support and sustain itself. I find that compelling and efficient. I would love to see how an environment would be made with these forms.”

The distinction between Lalvani and his more celebrated peers in the realm of commercial architecture is that he did not set out to translate postmodern ideas into headline-grabbing buildings. His goal was simply to continue his graduate studies. The incentive to put theory into practice came from more practical considerations. According to Gitlin, Lalvani wanted to send his son to private school and couldn’t afford to. Gitlin says this with the affable swagger of a Brooklyn businessman. The more measured but beguiling delivery of Lalvani, the academic immigrant from India, makes a striking contrast. They’re an odd pair. But it’s encouraging to think that pure research has met a real-world partner in the form of a family-owned metalworking shop in Brooklyn.

Toward the end of my visit Lalvani takes me out to get coffee from a stainless-steel canteen truck parked under the expressway to serve local factory workers. He tells me, with a gleam of delight in his eye, that he thinks of Milgo/Bufkin as “romantic.” For a theorist immersed in one field for decades to suddenly see his ideas made manifest must be a rewarding experience. As for Milgo/Bufkin, it’s a collaboration that could take the venerable Greenpoint firm well into the twenty-first century.

Algo-Spaces

Soft-Algo

Xurf Ceiling Light Fixture (2009), Na Ok Woo Conference Room, School of Architecture, Pratt Institute (with architect Richard Scherr). Photo: Ajmal Aqtash.

Tri-Hex Xurf (2007), Siggraph2008 exhibit, Los Angeles. Photo: Ajmal Aqtash.

Zig-Zag Xurf (2008), detail; presently on display at the Philoctetes Center, New York.

HyperSpheroid (2008), detail; Siggraph2008 exhibit, Los Angeles. Photo: Ajmal Aqtash.

Xurf Mirror (2008). Photo: Bruce Gitlin.

Lalvini (above, on the left) stands with Milgo/Bufkin chairman Bruce Gitlin in front of AlgoRhythms forms.Robert Polidori for Metropolis

HISTORY

Bruce Gitlin, owner and CEO of MILGO BUFKIN, long desired to create origami in metal. If a delicate bird could be created from a sheet of paper, he wondered if a sheet of metal could be similarly folded to yield elegant new forms.

Gitlin’s grandfather started MILGO/BUFKIN in 1916 as a truck body shop, and his father expanded the company to bend metal for architectural applications. Gitlin discontinued the truck work, added the fabrication of sculpture, purchased state-of-the-art equipment, and developed new technologies, growing the company exponentially. For the past forty years, MILGO/BUFKIN has continually introduced new materials, finishes, and technologies to support the innovations of leading architects, designers and artists.

When Gitlin was searching for new approaches that would transform architecture in the new millennium, he met Dr. Haresh Lalvani, a prominent architect-morphologist, known for his use of higher dimensional mathematics to create structures based on new geometries. Dr. Lalvani has been a professor for the past thirty years at Pratt Institute, the New York based, internationally acclaimed school of art, architecture and design.

Their serendipitous meeting began a collaboration that enabled Dr. Lalvani to combine decades of research and many patented inventions with MILGO/BUFKIN’s cutting-edge fabrication technologies. Their collaboration over four years of research and the filing of several patents led to AlgoRhythm Technologies, a division of MILGO/BUFKIN dedicated to the design, production, and marketing of a unique line of architectural products with curvilinear surfaces.

The transformation of AlgoRhythm Technologies’ designs into products was facilitated by the metal working expertise of Alex Kveton, a sculptor with a fine arts and industrial design background. Also key to the effort was the computer modeling of Neil Katz, a former student of Lalvani’s and now an associate at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Katz used advanced software to translate Dr. Lalvani’s algorithmic concepts into computer models used to manufacture the products and to generate some of the images used in this brochure. The images were then computer-rendered by Mohamad Al-Khayer and Ajmal Aqtash, former and current students respectively.

Dr. Lalvani’s new architectural forms can transform the design field, for they facilitate the creation of endless variations of integrated design environments with innovative, curvilinear surfaces. For AlgoRhythm Technologies’ potential economic impact and industry-leading ideas, New York State recognized the project in 2008 with a coveted NYSTAR (New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research) grant in affiliation with Pratt Institute.

Bruce Gitlin and Dr. Haresh Lalvani have created a new architectural language grounded in nature and higher mathematics. They have gone far beyond their initial search for origami in metal.

HARESH LALVANI, Ph.D. AlgoRhythm Technologies is the culmination of Dr. Haresh Lalvani’s career in combining architecture and higher mathematics to create a new architectural vocabulary of surfaces, especially in metal. A professor at Pratt Institute for the past thirty years where he has influenced generations of designers and architects, Dr. Lalvani holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Known worldwide for his morphological, structural, and design innovations, he serves on the editorial boards of Space Structures, (U.K.), and Structural Topology (Canada). He is also affiliated with The Structural Morphology Group (European-based), the International Association of Shell and Space Structures, the Japan Institute of Hyperspace Science, and ISIS-Symmetry (Hungary). An award recipient from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Institute for Architectural Education, Dr. Lalvani continues his groundbreaking work as an artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and as the Co-Director of the Center for Experimental Structures at the School of Architecture, Pratt Institute. He is a MILGO/BUFKIN Design Fellow. Dr. Lalvani holds numerous patents that combine morphology, mathematics, and design. From his playful and challenging Metapuzzles to his discovery of Hyper-Geodesic Structures for architecture, he has combined his love of both art and mathematics to generate new languages of design. © Milgo Industrial Inc., 2002

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