Algorithmic Tapestry

The title came from me — but it turned out there were two fabric artists on the selection committee, so the word tapestry landed better than I could have planned.

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 something that has stayed with me: 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 make it exist in the real world — just as an artist moves from idea to object, from imagination to something you can touch. The floor is about that flow: from the abstract to the real, from the equation to the moving car, from the algorithm to the nano-scale structure.

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 made of knotted strings that is also, if you look at it the right way, a fractal. Julia set fractals appear throughout. At the end of one hall, the inside of a Turbo 350 transmission anchors the automotive engineering section. I had always wanted to put one of those transmissions in my old Jeep. This seemed like the next best thing.

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 ran out of room in the studio. One night I loaded finished sections onto the roof of my Jeep and drove toward my storage unit. It was windy, and getting worse. I pulled into a Home Depot parking lot to buy extra rope, and every sheet let loose at once — flying across the parking lot, over cars, and out into the neighborhood. There was a moment. Then I went inside and bought the rope and tried to gather up all the pieces. Those sections had to be redone.

I drove it all to Madison. I ended up buying a 1958 Jeep truck while I was there, which was cheaper than renting a car for those four months. I spent them 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 — wanting to tell her that their son had made the floor. She told them she wasn’t even an engineering student. She just loved to come study there, she said, because of the floor and the way the space felt. To me, that makes for a successful design.