How Something So Still
Can Have So Much Movement.

A simple toy. Either one of Frank's grandchildren's, or something he picked up because it interested him. Very early work, the first couple of years, somewhere around 2003 to 2005. He just said, model it. It looks trivial, but getting it positioned so that it reads as symmetric from every direction took a bit of doing. This one is metal. Later we made it in plastic materials and painted it, to simulate the toy itself.

Early work. Frank brought in a rubber toy shaped like a football. I modelled it and then changed it, different holes and different cuts, and we started playing with it, cutting it and slicing it. All the wires you see here were added later, by hand. They were never modelled and never designed.

The same football piece seen from a different angle, and from here you can see the hat. The first two hats were designed well before my time, by another designer, and we leaned on them. They existed as surface models, so I converted them to full solids, which is what let us perform operations between them and everything else. The hats that came after those I built myself.

Another version of the football and the hat, cut completely differently. This one has several footballs and a single hat, which you can see in the middle. It is a lot of variations on the same shape. That is what the first few years looked like. We would take one geometry and exhaust it. The vocabulary was small, maybe ten parts altogether, and we would combine them and slice them and keep pulling different results out of the same geometry. That changed later, once I was given the freedom to go and do whatever I thought.

The hat partly covers an open heart. It came from a chocolate mould given to me while I was visiting factories in Belgium in 2003 or 2004, where they were designing moulds.

This one opened like a clam: two halves on a small hinge, rather than an opening on one side to pull the chocolate out. Chocolate was poured into it, but a cut across the top left the heart missing a piece. I designed it on my laptop during the flight back to the United States. By the time I landed, I had several versions. Those went into the sculptures.

In summer 2008, at a SolidWorks event, their chief executive, a man I knew personally, asked what I did besides run my company. I told him I designed sculptures with a famous artist and showed him the hat.

He asked which tool I had used.

“Yours,” I said.

He said SolidWorks could not build that geometry; I must have imported it. I fetched my laptop and invited him to inspect the model's feature tree. As he went through it, I watched his face change. He called the chief technology officer, told him to come and learn everything I could tell him, then told him to hire me.

I joined much later. In 2017 I became vice president of the whole product portfolio.

The straight star, flat faces and sharp points, was designed by Martin Francis, who owned the yacht design company I was working at when I met Frank. That one is called the Martin star, and it is his. This is the next thing along. I took the centre point of each face and lifted it slightly, which domed them, and that version is the puffed star. Later again the sharp edges and the points came off, and those have other names of their own. The same star turns up in the wine net piece, where it is smaller and sliced. This one is large, and hollow. We also played with a wall of holes around this idea, where from each side you see a different sculpture.

This is early work in a much later rendering. When I was visiting Frank, he brought out an orange peel he had cut in a single spiral. “Can you model this?” he asked. So I did. A day or two later it dried into another shape, and I modelled it again. A few days later, again. One peel became several spirals, twisting and bending in different directions. That started the series.

I wanted it in a transparent material. Transparent printing was not possible then; years later it was, and we printed it. This version went further. Like the fish, it has holes for movement and rods because it cannot stand alone. Even the rods bend a little. You will very rarely find anything straight in my work.

A while after the orange, Frank peeled a mandarin and asked whether I could build that one too. The coral pieces at the top are that mandarin peel. I modelled it as it came off the fruit, and then, because I was never going to leave it as it was, I started cutting into it, twisting it and moving it until it had become something else. They sit as a crown on the blue piece, which is a different design altogether and a story of its own. The peel itself I kept and dried, and years later I cast it in epoxy.

A few weeks or months after the orange, Frank peeled a mandarin and asked whether I could build that one too. That piece became the iconic one for me. I kept the peel itself as well as I could. I had sprayed sealers on it, so it stopped being organic material and never rotted. In 2020, by which time it had been dry for about fifteen years, I cast it in epoxy. It sits on my working desk.

The foam net they wrap round an expensive bottle, and sometimes round expensive fruit. I built the net in CAD and then bent it open like a mushroom. That is the yellow piece. The grey one is the same net, opened a different way. The red piece is a hand toy, half a circle that folds back and forward and ties into itself, and we made a lot of versions of it. This is early work. Frank would hand me the foam and the toys and say, go play with that. The stars start here, and they keep coming back.

These are the ninja stars. There are two kinds here, one with three corners and one with four, and a cat in the middle. They are twisted rather than straight. I think toys came into this one somewhere as well, though I am not certain of that. The interesting part came afterwards. Frank saw them and asked whether I could make those in glass. So I made ninja stars out of glass. I never found out exactly what he did with them, but he most likely worked them into one of his sculptures. That is the only glass I made myself that went into the work we designed together.

Seven years into the collaboration.

Frank had a studio in Manhattan, and later the work moved to an aircraft hangar in New Jersey. This looks to me like the hangar, as far as I remember it, although it could be a setup in a museum before a gallery opening. You can see the big star in the middle, in its different colours. It is the same star as the halved puffed star beside it: that one is the design, this is the piece as it was made.

Back to the puffed star, except here the domes are much bigger and much more visible. The result was then sliced in half. For the top I built one portion of the star and duplicated it across the whole top half until it closed into a single piece. The bottom half is hollow. Another variation of the puffed star, taken a different way.

This one came out of playing with other tools. New technologies kept arriving and I would go and work with them, not for any particular piece, but to see what they could do that could not be done before, and whether anything in them would give me an idea. This was minimum energy surfaces, which come back in other pieces later on. I knew quite well what I was doing with it, and what came out was a surface that read to me straight away as the structure of a bone. So the piece is a set of bones, broken in different places. Not human bones, and nothing violent in it. They simply reminded me of bones, and that is where the piece came from.

There are six different stars in this one, and each of them has smaller stars inside it. The bow ties are in here as well, the ones that were made earlier, and so are the snails. Pieces like that moved from one sculpture into another.

Stars fascinated Frank. Looking for more ideas from a star, I found a mesh tool in somebody's master's or doctoral research. You set rules and conditions, and it generates geometry. I spent several months learning it, made changes, then converted the results into solids we could work on. That is where the spiral came from. I also found that the tool could tessellate curved surfaces, breaking them into straight triangles.

The cowboy hat is built like a hat. I projected a flat net of crossing lines onto its top surface, then swept a circular or other section along each curve. Hide the solid underneath and only the sweeps remain. The star in the middle was made like the other stars.

The second net comes from engineering packaging: making a negative on both sides of a delicate part so it sits in a void that fits exactly. A tool wraps a flat surface around the part, like pressing it into hot, flexible plastic. The part hidden inside this net is one I worked out myself.

Then I used the hat's method with a finer mesh. Lines crossing in two dimensions become curves crossing in three. Sweep a section along them and remove the body underneath, and you have a net holding the shape of something no longer there.

I name every piece, and every child part inside it, for whatever it reminds me of. The names are just my associations, nothing official. This one came out of an experiment. A technology called subdivision had just appeared, where you push and pull faces by hand to reach a surface that would be very hard to build with ordinary surface commands. I made the surface in that tool, brought it into the CAD, and started tracing it, pulling out curves, extruding along them, folding a little. What came back resembled a bow tie. Then I copied the bow tie parallel to itself, punched holes through both, and ran straight cylinders between them to connect them. I am not a musician, but it looked to me like musical notes. That is where this piece was born.

I am constantly in museums, usually not art museums. At a Harvard museum of sea creatures, I photographed a wall of seashells from around the world. I took pictures all the time then. A tree or a shape in the street would set me thinking about what I could combine it with.

I began modelling the shell as faithfully as I could, but it quickly changed and deformed. Everything at the top came from that seashell. The rest uses star pieces we had built over the years. Here they do not make a whole star. Only the pointy parts are its points.

This one is built out of pieces we have already seen. The green star stands on its own. The green and the red one are a combination, one connected into the other. The bow tie with the musical notes is in here. So are two snails, each twisted a different way, intersecting one another. The blue wires came from somewhere else entirely. They were inspired by a toy we bought for my daughter when she was five years old. You spin it, and it has stripes running around it that open and close, and they get tangled all the time. That is where those came from.

There are around nine stars in this one, although you only see three. Each star has more stars inside it, and they hold each other together. The second star in is connected both to the large star outside it and to the smaller star within it, so the whole thing is one object. All of those stars are a single piece. The small forms in the middle that look as though they are broken came from one of the rocks at the Harvard museum. I built the rocks as they were to begin with, and then of course I started manipulating them and changing them into other shapes. Some of them ended up looking like the legs of an elephant. But they come from the rocks.

Around 1999 or 2000, long before Frank, I was product manager at a CAD company. After seeing a demonstration of deformable modelling, I offered to be one of the first customers to evaluate it. We embedded it in our product. When I showed the developer's chief executive what we had done, it exceeded what they had imagined. He said he would use it in his own product too. Three or four years later, SolidWorks integrated it.

The technology bends, twists and stretches geometry under constraints. It was never popular for design, but it was everywhere in freeform work. Having worked with it early, I knew it inside out.

This piece began as a flat fish silhouette. I gave it volume, punched holes through it, then removed one face to hollow it out. That left the cylinders inside, each given a different height and treatment. Then I pushed and pulled until nobody could work out how it was made.

The same technology made the hat that could not be made in glass. Even its developers did not know everything it could do. But it was not only the tool. The way I used it was my own.

The same piece as the fish, twisted. That is the whole difference, and it gives you a completely different object. There were several kinds of distortion available, and this is what one of them does.

A different variation, built from different assemblies. A sphere with hollow pieces inside it, and the same sphere stretched, so that every circle and every hole has turned into an ellipse. What makes this one look so unlike the fish is the treatment of the holes and the cylinders. They are all related to each other.

In November 2015 I lost my father. He had been in hospital a long time before that, months of it. They had pictures on the walls there to try to cheer people up, and the pictures were of clowns, some of them on their own and some of them together. Something in them caught me straight away, so I photographed them, and then I did nothing with them. When my father passed away the pictures came back to me. I traced the silhouettes of the individual clowns, the same way I had done with the fish, and extruded them hollow. Looking at it now, eleven years later, I understand why I made them hollow. Losing your father leaves a big hole in your heart. Then I twisted them, and gave them a placement in space, and put them together, not side by side but intersecting one another. There are more in the series. They all started there.

Generative design was new to me. Instead of building geometry, you define physical and mechanical constraints, minimum surface and other conditions, and let the tool generate a shape. I had no idea what would come out.

This was the first result, with a few changes afterwards. It was too thin to manufacture, so I knew I would have to add thickness. I experimented with constraints, forces, heat transfer and mechanical simulations, then exported it into SolidWorks, which I used constantly.

The part was already interesting. Frank got excited and said he had no comments.

This is a variation of the generative piece. The swirling geometry in the middle comes from something else.

Since about 2010, when 3D printing bureaus appeared and I had printers at home, I had been intersecting my wife's or children's initials. The solid reads as one letter from one side and another from the other side.

Here, two letters with a significant meaning sit inside a spherical cage, twisted until you cannot recognise them. Later I did the same with Frank's initials, FS, in a piece outside this archive. The geometry comes out unpredictable. That is central to how I design. Someone looking at a piece should struggle to work out how it was made, rather than see a circle and a box put together.

A digital view of the design in a room.

The sculpture stands in the middle of the space. Each wall carries the same piece flattened into two dimensions from that wall's own angle, so a visitor sees the object and their own view of it at the same time. The geometry has to be worked backwards, from where someone will be standing.