We would like to thank Arta Yazdanseta for taking the time and contributing the following article to digitalfutures. Arta is currently teaching a REVIT course @ Pratt Manhattan.

Professional Practice Lecture Series Pratt Institute  School of Undergraduate Architecture

Intro:

According to the McGraw Hill Construction 2009 Smart Market Report – The Business Value of BIM, the number of professionals in the AEC (architecture, engineer and construction) fields who make use of BIM as an

integral part of their practice experienced a large upswing in growth from 28% of professionals in 2007 to 48%

of professionals in 2009.

As the professional adoption of BIM is gaining momentum, the AEC industry is confronting the inevitable next step: that is, to use BIM throughout all the phases of a building’s life cycle; from its conceptual creation to construction to facilities management to demolition.

This research-based lecture series is aimed to answer some of the questions on the subjects mentioned above.

BIM + IPD (Integrated Project Delivery)

Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) is a project delivery method distinguished by a contractual agreement between a minimum of the owner, design professional, and builder where risk and rewards are shared and stakeholder success is dependent on project success.

Change in dynamic > Change in workflow

The new IPD Agreement redefines the traditional relationship of the three main participants of a project: the Owner, the Designer, and the Builder. The consequence of this change in dynamic is the drastic change in a project’s workflow.

In this lecture we examine the characteristics of this new dynamic between the key participants of a project and the resulting workflow.

Change in the main parties’ dynamic:

A California Council these changes in the relationships and roles of the main participants can be broken down into six main categories:

1- Early Involvement of the Key Participants:

From the very beginning the owner should identify the designer and the builder of the project. The relationships should be established on mutual trust and respect, and compatibility and comfort in collaboration should be tested. The team will help the owner to crystallize the project’s goals and objectives from very early on.

2- Shared Risk/ Rewards:

Full Integrated Project Delivery is a goal-oriented project delivery, wherein the team members share the losses and gains of a project. This new mindset creates a stronger incentive for participants to work towards the success of the project instead of personal gain.

3- Multi-Party Contact:

The IPD Agreement is a three-way contract, which unites the three main parties (Owner, Architect, and Builder) together. As a result, the success of one party is tied directly to the other. It is crucial, for the success of the project, that from the very beginning the risk and responsibility matrix of each participant be clearly identified.

4- Collaborative Decision Making/Control:

From the beginning of a project the main parties need to establish an agreement and a method to ensure that their representatives are involved in every step of the project. Also, the parties need to execute a previously agreed upon system where possible disagreements between team members can be resolved by an hierarchical management team.

5- Liability Wavers Among Key Participants:

To reinforce the sense of unity and a collaborative environment the main parties should waive any claim amongst themselves except for in the instance of a willful default. However, third-party liability (meaning, parties involved beyond the initial three-way contract, such as sub-contractors) should be addressed by the standard liability coverage.

6- Jointly Developed/Validated Target:

To gauge a project’s success the parties need to agree upon a clear and specific set of criteria. This set of criteria can be established according to the owner’s goal for the project and can vary from schedule and budget to sustainability objectives. The compensation of the non-owner parties will be in accordance to the meeting of the established targets.

Change in workflow:

“A Building Information Model is a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility. As such, it serves as a shared knowledge resource for information about a facility forming a reliable basis for decisions during life cycle from inception onward.”

National Institute of Building Science (NIBS)

Building Information Modeling (BIM) programs have revolutionized the workflow of IPD. From the very early stages of a project AEC professionals can have access to information that would not have been available to them in a typical project until the very end of the CD phase.

BIM creates an environment where designers and builders can come together to help one another

to make wiser decisions in advancement of a better and more responsible project. The resulting digital model would be used, not only throughout the conception and construction of a building, but for facility managing and, eventually, the demolition of a building.

In this new workflow, the idea of the clear phases of a project blur. Since the digital model is constantly evolving, and the building data is readily and instantaneously available to all parties, the traditional SD, DD, and CD sets change to “just in time” sets.

This increase of information requires a longer time period to manage and, as a result, the design phase of a project expands. However, by the end of the Detailed Design phase, the model has evolved to a high level of sophistication so that the Implementation Document phase shortens drastically.

Also, since from the very beginning the builder is involved with the project, the bidding and contractual negotiation phase will be eliminated and the cost estimates and market risk controls become much more accurate.

Shop Drawings will eventually become eliminated. Architects will not be obligated to create detail drawings to show the design intent. The builder must provide the digital BIM model with the required detailed elements. These elements will be discussed between the main participants and will be approved and used directly for construction and fabrication. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s 2004 survey, estimated RFI management costs (combined contractors and architects/engineers) has been $500 million per year. Since IDP allows for a seamless and much more accurate coordination and collaboration between parties, the amount of RFI costs will be drastically decreased.

In conclusion, it is important to highlight that BIM can be explored to its fullest by practicing Integrated Project Delivery. In order to gain the maximum advantage of IPD, the team members should be willing to collaborate in a transparent and open-book manner to create an environment of trust. Integrated Project Delivery is an option for sophisticated and active owners, whose goals are not only their financial gain, but also a better design and higher quality of work.

A Case Study

The following case study is one of six case studies done by a collaboration of AIA National, AIA California Council, AGC California and McGraw-Hill Construction.

Autodesk AEC Solutions Division Headquarters is one of the few projects that have been fully developed through Integrated Project Delivery. Below is a summary of the study released by the AIA California Council in 2010.

Early Involvement of Key Participants

Autodesk conducted a selection process to find an architect/builder team willing to try Integrated Project Delivery. The RFP clearly stated the owner’s direction in terms of scope, budget, sustainability goals and the mandated form of agreement. At first, another team was the front runner but their corporate leadership asked for fundamental changes in the proposed IPD arrangement which Autodesk declined to make. In the end, KlingStubbins and Tocci were chosen because of their qualifications, familiarity with the local market, BIM and LEED sophistication, and willingness to abide by a “true” IPD agreement. But another factor was their proposal to allocate fees and incentives within the fixed project budget. Three major subcontractors were also selected early and included in the risk/reward structure.

Shared Risk/Reward

The contract establishes an Incentive Compensation Layer (ICL) in which the architects’ and builders’ anticipated profit is put at risk. If specific goals are met, designers and builders receive their normal profit, but jointly, not separately. If they are exceeded in measurable ways the firms are eligible for additional compensation. The ICL could adjust from minus 20% to plus 20% depending on whether project goals were met or exceeded.

Multi-Party Contract

The Integrated Project Delivery Agreement (IPDA) is a three-way contract between the owner, the architect and the builder. Each party’s success is directly tied to the performance of the others. Distinct roles and responsibilities are delineated in contract language and in a “responsibility matrix.” Major subcontractors (mechanical/fire protection, electrical, and drywall) were also brought in to the agreement, worked at cost, and shared in the incentive program.

Collaborative Decision Making/Control

By contract, three levels of collaborative teams were established to manage the project. A Project Implementation Team (PIT) was set up to handle the day-to-day issues of the project. The composition of the PIT included project participants whose work at any given time could impact the project’s outcome. A Project Management Team (PMT) with representation of the owner, architect, and builder, was established to manage the project and make decisions by consensus. If issues arose that could not be resolved by the PMT they were taken to a higher level for final resolution: a Senior Management Team, (SMT) again with representation of the three principal parties.

Liability Waivers Among Key Participants:

The parties waived all claims against each other except those arising from fraud, willful misconduct or gross negligence. Disputes were to be resolved by mediation or, if necessary, arbitration. Each party was required to maintain typical insurance but with the provision that policies be amended so that no right of subrogation (the ability to gain the rights belonging to one party against a third party who caused a loss) existed against the other partners.

Jointly Developed/Validated Targets:

The contract spelled out specific criteria that would be used to judge success. These included schedule and budget, sustainability, quality of craftsmanship, functionality, and design quality. Owner, architect, and builder jointly selected three comparable projects in the Boston area to serve as benchmarks against which these goals would be measured. It was agreed – after some hesitation from the team – that an independent evaluator (in this case an architecture professor) would be the arbiter of how successfully the project met the design quality criteria. There was a scorecard and the process was made as objective as possible.

Through ongoing interviews that we have been conducting at core.form-ula, we have decided to highlight one video in particular for digital futures. We sat down with William Katavolos and got an incite on his experience as a Professor with over 50 years teaching at Pratt.

As we transition from one period to another, understanding the history becomes critical in building upon some of the rich pedagogies within the school and charting a path into the 21st century.

“More or less we have finished with “A”, we are now finishing with “B”, you better pull the “A”/ “B” together before you lose it but you better start on the new “C” and then of course you will have the “CA”, “CB”, the “ABC” and then we will have ourselves a great school” WK

You will be able to see parts 1-12 on core.form-ula over the next three weeks, in addition, digital future will be posting a lecture William Katavolos gave in 1994 that Gamal El-Zoghby has graciously extended to us.

Screen-cast from Alex Roman that takes you through modeling, rendering and compositing in motion graphics (3dsmax, Vray, AfterEffects and Premiere.).  “A FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already built spaces.” I am sure we will see many great things from him to come.

For more information on this project please visit thirdseventh.com/ + his vimeo page.

compositing breakdown

The Chip Replaces Palladio By John Lobell

The most pervasive principle in modern physics is described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics; the principle that all systems (including the universe as a whole) tend to run down. That is, they move towards disorder, randomness, uniformity, and a “loss” of energy which becomes trapped in useless low entropy forms. The principle of entropy will ultimately bring our universe to a condition of randomly dispersed gases in which no orderly or meaningful activity will be possible as all of its energy will be helplessly dispersed among the dancing particles.

The Second Law is unquestionably established (at least in a system where time reversal is not possible as seems to be the case in our expanding universe) yet we are living in the midst of a major contradiction to that law. Evolution on the earth in moving from the random molecules in the primordial “soup,” to organic compounds and particles, to single celled organisms, and finally to the complex plant and animal life we know today, is actually an expression of anti-entropic activity. From the random to the orderly. While this seeming violation of the Second Law could always be explained by realizing that a system as a whole must obey the law, while any part of it could be in violation, contemporary information theory gives a much more satisfactory explanation of this seeming contradiction.

It can now be shown that the energy reaching the Earth from the Sun is actually acting as information. Information and energy are interchangeable in much the same way that energy and matter are interchangeable, and formulas similar to those for matter and energy (E=mc2) can be used to express this interchangeability. Energy is expressing itself as information when it acts in an anti-entropic manner, thereby reducing the randomness in a system or increasing its information. This understanding of information as an anti-entropic activity makes it possible to objectively measure many qualities important to our lives which were formerly measurable only by the crude means of the dollar economy, sentimental attachment, or aesthetic tastes.

The unit of measure now being used by some sophisticated whole system thinkers is sometimes called the “eco-dollar.” The eco-dollar can be used to measure the true cost of electricity purchased from Con Ed by including the health and cleaning costs of pollution in the calculated sum. The eco-dollar can be used to measure the loss of a species of wild bird in terms of the resultant simplification of the overall system when we lose that bird’s concentration of information in its gene pool. And the eco-dollar can be used to measure the social worth of a novel in terms of the new information or new ordering of information it brings into the social system. Information theory used in this way gives us a more useful means of evaluating Con Ed, endangered wild life, and literature than the previous means (dollars, sentiment and aesthetics). It also makes it possible to compare the relative value of one to another, once they are all expressed in terms of the new units, “eco-dollars.”

It might at first seem absurd to claim that animal life, literature, and perhaps even human life can be measured in numerical terms. It is not actually as destructive of subjective values as it might seem, since the value expressed can only be for a given situation and will vary for different observers. Thus, the new ordering of information in a novel is new only for a reader who is not familiar with that ordering. For another reader it might all be “old hat.” The new information in a message (now expressed in bits) varies for different receivers. One reader of our novel may find it worth many eco-dollars; another, few.

What is the relevance to approaching a new energy economy in terms of information theory? The value comes in realizing that information is nothing more nor less than anti-entropic activity, and that so is everything else of use that we do. All useful transportation is the movement of people or goods from positions of less energy potential (home or warehouses, for example) to positions of more energy potential (office–where work can be done; store–where customers can effect purchases, for example). In realizing that all of our intentions are anti-entropic, it becomes apparent that these intentions can be fulfilled either by physical movement or by movement of information. Obviously the movement of information requires far less energy than the movement of people or physical goods. The telephone company uses far less electricity than the subway system, yet the anti-entropic value in “bits” or “eco-dollars” resulting from phone calls, telephone, xerox, and computer terminals is greater than the anti-entropic value of commuters moved by the subways.

Images by Andrey Kravtsov

In 1900, ninety percent of our GDP was manufactured goods and ninety percent of workers were blue collar. Ten percent of the GDP was services and information and ten percent of workers were white collar. Today it is fifty-fifty on both counts. In another hundred years, it will be ten-ninety the other way. Anti-entropic activity must be sustained, and must be increased if the population is to increase. However, this fight against entropy can be expressed in energy and material goods, or it can be expressed in information. Our culture is evolving towards the choice of information in its struggle against entropy, and thereby stands a strong chance of approaching (although not actually achieving) a zero energy situation. The amount of energy needed to process, encode, and move information is rapidly decreasing as we approach a state of one hundred percent efficiency.

The process of becoming an information based culture is not without its problems, which are threefold. First is the energy needed which remains substantial until more efficient techniques are developed, second is social adjustment to the massive amount of information floating around and third is the developing of channel capacity for th

e information to be moved. The cultural and psychic changes that will come about as these problems are rapidly solved over the next two decades will transform us into creatures we would hardly recognize.

Advances in communications and computers have already opened a lot of possibilities. At the same time we are being closed in on ourselves by the feedback potential of miniaturized hand held computers, the capacity for the electronic web encircling the globe to put us more and more directly in touch with each other and all sources of information is also rapidly expanding. A pair of telephone wires in 1930 could carry 60,000 bits of information. A co-axial cable introduced in the 1940s can carry 684,000 bits of information. Laser fiber optics are able to transmit 100,000,000,000 bits of information. The increases are no longer only quantitative.

image BSC

These recent additions to the electronic complex surrounding us will bring radical changes in the human form in just a few years, changes which will ultimately result in our leaving our bodies as excessive energy consuming relics and moving like hermit crabs onto magnetic tapes–biologic films–which can be stored in energy free states and which can run on a couple of AA batteries.

“I was traveling with The Intolerable Kid in The Nova Lark–We were on the nod after a rumble in The Crab Galaxy involving this two-way time shock; when you come to the end of a biologic film just run it back and start over–nobody knows the difference–Like nobody there before the film.” -William Burroughs, Nova Express

From Newton’s Space through Einstein’s Spacetime, we now live in a non-space, each point of which constitutes an entire four dimensional geometry. As more of our personalities can be stored and transmitted, and as technology makes time, distance and energy meaningless to human existence, we approach a cosmic nature in which all of reality is integrated into the personality.

The world becomes less matter and more information; translatable, storable, and transportable at the speed of light. The human personality as contained in its biological housing can be indefinitely preserved in liquid nitrogen. Translated into genetic code it can be stored and shipped on DNA. Translated into digital code it could be projected across the universe.

The new world created by a new perception becomes a timeless spaceless flux of simultaneity. Nations dissolve into projections of cosmic consciousness. Buildings and cities become the magnetic tapes and the fluidic valves that house and transmit projected consciousness. Photo-etched onto ceramic micro-circuits; structured on self-reproducing DNA, personality survives the ravages of entropy. Cities empty and circuits are occupied. The computer chip replaces Palladio.

top image credit: Argonne National Laboratory

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John Lobell received his architecture degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently a professor at Pratt Institute. His interests range widely, and include, besides architecture, cultural theory, consciousness, art, Buddhism, mythology, information theory, post-humanism, quantum reality and quantum architecture.

To find out more of what he is up to please visit:

http://johnlobell.com/

http://www.futurefeeder.com/category/jac/

http://www.cinemadiscourse.com/

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

image via Stephen Lyth 2006

“Deleuze and the Use of the Genetic Algorithm in Architecture”, Speaker: Manuel Delanda, Date: April 9, 2004, Art and Technology Lecture Series

Manuel De Landa, (born 1952 in Mexico City), is a writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University (New York), the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, a lecturer at the Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and adjunct professor at Pratt Institute the School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. He has a BFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts.

He is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002) and A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006). He has published many articles and essays and lectured extensively in Europe and in the United States. His work focuses on the theories of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on one hand, and modern science, self-organizing matter, artificial life and intelligence, economics, architecture, chaos theory, history of science, nonlinear dynamics, cellular automata on the other. De Landa became a principal figure in the “new materialism” based on his application of Deleuze’s realist ontology. His universal research into “morphogenesis” – the production of the semi-stable structures out of material flows that are constitutive of the natural and social world – has been of interest to theorists across many academic and professional disciplines.

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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