Bend the Rules of Structure
A Brooklyn metalworking shop with an unlikely name may hold the key to 21st-century shapemaking.
By Peter Hall
Photography by Robert Polidori for Metropolis
June 2003
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.
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."
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."
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."
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.
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The expensive--and comparatively slow--press brake machine could be made
obsolete by Milgo/Bufkin's AlgoRhythms System. |
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MILGO PROJECTS
AlgoRhythms--Haresh Lalvani's system for efficiently bending sheets of metal
into complex forms. The Column Museum (above) is a virtual record of
the column covers possible using AlgoRhythms. These variations show how
the system lends itself to mass-customization.
Courtesy Hashesh Lalvani. Computer image by Neil Katz and Mohamad Al-Khayer. |
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The continuous surface of Milgo Gallery 1 (above)--a proposed
gallery space for the factory --forms a ceiling and walls; the bends
serve as shelves for display objects.
Courtesy Hashesh Lalvani. Computer image by Neil Katz and Ajmal Aqtash. |
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Milgo Gallery 2 (above) is another potential gallery.
Courtesy Hashesh Lalvani. Computer image by Neil Katz. |
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Each Umbrella (above) shows how a column can transition into a
ceiling.
Courtesy Hashesh Lalvani. Computer image by Neil Katz and Mohamad Al-Khayer. |
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Waveknot (above) is a continuos-winding space with a rippled
surface.
Courtesy Hashesh Lalvani. Computer image by Neil Katz and Mohamad Al-Khayer. |
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This aerial view of the Transitions space (above) shows
how regular walls (left side) morph into irregular ones (right side).
Courtesy Hashesh Lalvani. Computer image by Neil Katz and Mohamad Al-Khayer. |
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