Algorithmic Tapestry

Algorithmic Tapestry is based on geometric algorithms commonly used by engineers, with depictions of quasicrystals, nanocrystals, and numeric systems spanning twenty thousand years to the present — including a Paleolithic lunar count from cave paintings in northern Spain and an Inkan quipu, a recording device and fractal made of knotted strings. Julia set fractals appear throughout. At the end of one hall, the inside of a Turbo 350 transmission anchors the automotive engineering section.

When I begin a project like this one, I try to find the connection between what I do and what the people in the building do. With a building full of engineers, I realized engineers are a great deal more like artists than they are like mathematicians. A mathematician works in the abstract. An engineer has to dream something up and then bring it into the real world. This floor is about moving from the abstract to the real, from the equation to the moving car, from the algorithm to the nano-scale structure.

During the selection process, I was told the Dean looked at my model and walked the length of it naming the apparently abstract shapes one by one—the Julia set fractal, the transmission, the quasicrystals. After that, they said, it was an obvious choice.

I made this floor myself. Not just designed it—made it, physically, with my own hands. I could not find a fabricator who would work within my payment schedule, so I decided to do it myself. For months I worked in my studio with a few artist friends I hired, fabricating more than three hundred panels of divider strip on four-by-eight-foot sheets of cardboard. I spent four months on my hands and knees laying the strip, with Roman Terrazzo coming in behind me to pour the epoxy.

After the project was complete, my parents visited the Engineering Centers Building on their own. They found a student studying in one of the halls and struck up a conversation and told her that their son had made the floor. She told them she wasn’t even an engineering student, but she just loved to come study there, she said, because of the floor and the way the building felt. To me, that makes for a successful design.