Dr. Haresh Lalvani is a sculptor, architect, morphologist, visual mathematician, inventor and a professor at Pratt Institute, working for over 30 years to “decode the morphological genome” – identifying the principles underlying natural and manmade forms. Lalvani’s work is driven by a search to understand how Nature designs its incredible creations using generative principles and formal codes combined with forming processes, so that we can design our own. Dr. Lalvani’s aims at sequencing the morphological genome and sculpting works derived from it’s principles, resulting in compelling physical structures of genomic architecture.
I am greatly interested in physical emergence, not just computational emergence. That is, how new phenomena emerge not just from computational rules, but from physical processes. This is intimately related to the question the physicists have been asking: how do we get something from nothing. If the physicists cannot create matter from nothing, we as architects-designers certainly cannot. This inspires us to develop the next best thing … I am also greatly interested in singularity, a point of convergence or divergence. This is used a lot in physics, say, in big bang origin or black holes, but it appears in string theory as well. My interest is in the shapes with a singularity and I have been developing these for several years. Interestingly, they lead to new mathematics, but we are looking at these from a design standpoint and see them as spaces and surfaces that could be of human use.
You can read more of Lalvani’s theories (as well as see another image) at PSFK.
