Benjamin Aranda + Chris Lasch, Terraswarm

A piece designed by Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch might take its form from the structure of nanomaterials. Then again, it might pull from the shape of flocking pigeons, or from the patterns in Native American baskets. These two architects derive their forms by taking naturally occurring geometries, unraveling the logic behind them, and working them into algorithms that can be used to design structures. The formulas they've derived have produced remarkably unpredictable and organic-looking objects. "We're operating using our intuition," Aranda says. "But we're using these generative processes to create something we otherwise couldn't imagine. That's something we share with scientists — there's an ethic of discovery."
Photo: Noah Kalina

"Rules of Six," a large wall installation, is an exploration of the molecular processes of self-assembly and modularity. To create the piece, Aranda and Lasch used an algorithm mimicking the processes that nanostructures use to grow and self-assemble. With just a few rules of interaction, similar to those molecules follow in the lab, they prompted the generation of a modular landscape. The result is a relief of interlocking hexagons that is stable at any scale — it could be a lattice of molecules or an urban center — and can grow indefinitely without collapsing.
Commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, 2008. By Aranda/Lasch in collaboration with materials scientist Matthew L. Scullin.

Aranda and Lasch's "Quasi table" was also inspired by molecular structure. The algorithm underlying this walnut dining table comes from the properties of quasicrystals, crystals that have so-called "forbidden symmetries" and lack a simple, repeating structure. While the thousands of wooden tetrahedrons that make up this table are nearly identical, the final product is intriguingly nonuniform and asymmetrical. "It's about this architectural holy grail of having the efficiency of modularity but the variety of irregularity," Lasch says.
Commissioned by the Johnson Trading Gallery. Photo: Noah Kalina.

The Morning Line will be a structure unlike anything ever built. According to artist Matthew Ritchie, it will be the first "semasiographic building," a building that is its own architectural language, that directly expresses its content through its structure. This open performance space will tell the creation story, as inspired by both traditional mythologies and the "cyclic universe" theory of physicists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok. Aranda and Lasch collaborated on this high-concept public art project with Ritchie, working closely with the artist to ensure that his drawings would always translate into a viable and stable three-dimensional structure.
Matthew Ritchie Studio 2007. Commissioned by T-B A21. Physical structure in collaboration with Aranda/Lasch and Daniel Bosia, Arup AGU.

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