Cradle

source: highlike

Work: Commissioned by the City of Santa Monica, Cradle is situated on the exterior wall of a parking structure at a shopping mall – originally designed by Frank Gehry. The site is near the beach, and is heavily trafficked by tourists on foot and in automobiles. An aggregation of mirror polished stainless steel spheres, the sculpture functions structurally like an enormous Newton’s Cradle – the ubiquitous toy found on the desktops of corporate executives in Hollywood films. Each ball is suspended by a cable from a point on the wall and locked in position by a combination of gravity and neighboring balls. The whole array reflects distorted images of passersby.

About: Ball-Nogues Studio is an integrated design and fabrication practice operating in a territory between architecture, art, and industrial design, led by Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues. Their work is informed by the exploration of craft. Essential to each project is the “design” of the production process itself, with the aim of creating environments that enhance sensation, generate spectacle and invite physical engagement.
Photographer: Monica Nouwens
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source: ball-nogues

Aside from the Newton’s Cradle reference, we wanted the overall shape to elicit things that we thought might be slightly provocative when inserted into the glitzy Santa Monica urban landscape. On one hand the installation resembles a big banana hammock (the type worn by unashamed men at the beach) and on the other it suggests the female reproductive system. Sometimes we think of it as a giant fly eye with hundreds of little lenses and at others its like sea foam or coral. Sometimes it resembles an urban scaled wall sconce and at others, a kind of imaginary awning for an invisible storefront. Regardless of what it looks like, it was an opportunity to develop a new kind of building system.

Cradle is as much a sculpture as it is an approach to making experimental structure in the post-digital era. We were interested in exploring ways of producing large scaled self-organizing structures. Cradle is comprised of an “informal” arrangement of parts; the relationship between each cannot be accurately modeled with digital software. The work is, however, an outgrowth of digital technology. A key technical concept for Cradle is “sphere packing” – the phenomenon where multiple balls squeezed together and self organize under the effect of gravity, a process we could only approximate, at best, using computer modeling. Software was useful for visualizing Cradle and for designing the overall shape of the formwork used to make it but not for predicting where the spheres positioned themselves in the physical world. The fabrication process was a bit like the process of slip casting ceramics except instead of pouring ceramic slip into a mold we “poured” hundreds of spheres. To our knowledge, this was the first time this technique has been used.

Ball-Nogues Studio is an integrated design and fabrication practice operating in a territory between architecture, art, and industrial design, led by Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues. Their work is informed by the exploration of craft. Essential to each project is the “design” of the production process itself, with the aim of creating environments that enhance sensation, generate spectacle and invite physical engagement. The Studio has exhibited at major institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum; PS1; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Venice Biennale; the Hong Kong | Shenzhen Biennale; and the Beijing Biennale. They have received numerous honors including three American Institute of Architects Design Awards, United States Artists Target Fellowships and a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. In 2007, the Studio was the winner of the Museum of Modern Art PS1 Young Architects Program Competition and recently, their work became part of the permanent collections of both MoMA and LACMA. In 2011, they were one of the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices. Benjamin and Gaston have taught in the graduate architecture programs at SCI-Arc, UCLA, and USC. Their work has appeared in a variety of publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Architectural Record, Artforum, Icon, Log, Architectural Digest, Mark and Sculpture.

The Studio is currently working on permanent public commissions for the City of El Paso, Portland State University, Central Washington University, and the VA Palo Alto Aquatic Center.

Benjamin Ball grew up in Colorado and Iowa where his mother’s involvement in theatre proved influential. While studying for his degree at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Ball logged stints at Gehry Partners and Shirdel Zago Kipnis. Upon graduation, he sought work as a set and production designer for films (including the Matrix series) as well as music videos and commercials with such influential directors as Mark Romanek and Tony Scott. His experience ranges from work on the Disney Concert Hall and small residential commissions for boutique firms to complex medical structures and event design. In his current collaboration with Gaston Nogues, Ball is exploring the intersection of architecture, art and product design through physical modeling and the use of digital and more traditional forms of production.

Gaston Nogues was born and raised in Buenos Aires before moving to Los Angeles at age 12. Frequently accompanying his father to his job as an aerospace engineer, Nogues acquired a fascination with the hands-on process of building. An honors graduate in architecture from SCI-Arc, he moved directly from school into a position at Gehry Partners where he worked in product design and production and became a specialist in creative fabrication. He remained there until 2005 except for a one-year stint in 1996 as an assistant curator at a fine arts publishing house, Gemini GEL. In his current collaboration with Benjamin Ball, Nogues is focused on fabricating what they visualize; on process as it relates to the built object. In his spare time, Nogues builds custom automobiles.
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source: dailyimpulse

An einem Parkhaus in Santa Monica hängt diese ziemlich auffällige Skulptur namens Cradle. Zahlreiche Kugeln aus rostfreiem Stahl spiegeln all das wieder, was sich um sie herum abspielt. Inspiriert von Kugelpackungen und dem klassischen Newton’s Cradle (dieses silberne Kugelstoßpendel, das den ein oder anderen Schreibtisch schmückt), ist jede einzelne Kugel über ein Stahlseil an der Wand befestigt und findet ihre Position durch das Zusammenspiel mit den benachbarten Spiegelbällen. Das Team von Ball-Nogues Studio nutzte für die Herstellung der Kugeln das Prinzip des Keramikgießens. Das grundlegende Design wurde im Voraus zwar am Computer ungefähr visualisiert – doch wie Cradle am Ende aussehen würde, blieb bis zum Tag des Aufbaus nur eine grobe Vorahnung…