[We] were doing different kinds of automation.

What was another one…? Oh — I think it was a

tool for the end of the arm on the space shuttle. Or
else it was the tool belt that the astronaut had.
He’d pick this thing up and it had a variety of tools.
Everything had to be three levels of redundancy for
the space programs. It was kind of an interesting
mental challenge to think that way.
- Bill Record, colleague of Chuck Hoberman, on
their early robotics work
Chuck Hoberman’s work focuses on the notion of
transformable design: objects, structures and
spaces that can change size and shape through
the respective movements of their parts. The
Expanding Sphere and Iris Dome could be
considered as prototypes that can be later adapted
for multiple uses — from toys to buildings. The
development of controlling surfaces defined by
geometric transformation, with zero material
thickness, has been combined with the rigorous
design and engineering of hinged and folding
mechanisms capable of expanding and
contracting without colliding with neighbouring
components.

Hoberman’s initial inspiration came from simple

scissor-like structures such as elevator doors and
the retractable telescopic arm of the shaving
mirror; his objective was to imagine systems where
changes in form and size would occur in three
dimensions rather than on a single plane. The use
of computers — in particular, customized
commands for CAD drawings, or AutoLISP, which
Hoberman coded himself — was crucial to solve
the complex mathematical and geometrical
calculations necessary to control the design and
engineering of each component of the structure,
later built as operational prototypes in collaboration
with Bill Record. These projects have led to a
series of industrial patents that Hoberman began
to register in 1986.

The geometric and robotic ambitions of

Hoberman’s Transforming Sphere are self-evident.
What is less apparent is the role that digital
technology played in the engineering and invention
of the patented mechanisms, movements and
spaces. Hoberman drafted the principles of
transforming geometric motion and then wrote
custom-coded AutoLISP scripts to test the
collisions and intersections that would define the
material thickness, profile and mechanism of these
robotic structures. The mechanisms were then
manufactured at small scales using the earliest 3D
printing technology and at larger scales using CNC
milling router tables and lathes. Large scale
mechanical connections were made without
tooling or casting but by cutting solid aluminum
billet into custom shapes and profiles. The
Transforming Sphere changes size, whereas the
Iris Dome has a variable oculus-like opening at its
center. The mechanisms explored in the sphere
are more like scissors, using hinges in free space,
while the iris is informed by physical and digital
origami models and uses pins and hinges in its
surface.
Deployment of 6 meter diameter geodesic dome. 1991.

Greg Lynn: Let’s start with a big question. Back in the

1990s, what made you think you needed a computer, or
did you need a computer to do what you were doing
then? And what role did it play?

Chuck Hoberman: “Need” is always a relative term. By

1990 I had been working with computers for close to ten
years. When I started my mechanical engineering studies
at Columbia, it was a part of the curriculum to take a
programming class, and that was also when the personal
computer was introduced. That was too big an event to
ignore if you were somewhat switched on to that culture.
By the time the 1990s came, I had finished my studies
and done a fair amount of programming and coding. But
I would say—the really intense interaction with computers
relative to my practice was actually happening in the late
1980s. I was working at a place called Honeybee
Robotics, which was a small start-up robotics firm. We
were designing hardware around robots, and we did that
all on AutoCAD. Around 1986–87 AutoCAD was very
different to what we understand as CAD today, but it was
a digital tool to draw with—strictly two-dimensional.
Getting back to your question about whether the
computer was necessary. I was—I am—an inventor. I
invent transformable objects and, really, typologies of
transformable objects. From this point of view, not only is
a computer not necessary, but in a certain way probably
even pencil and paper aren’t necessary because what I
do is really about a certain type of mathematical insight
and visualization, and then there’s a lot of work to
implement it. At that point, the computer is enormously
valuable because while you can think of something in its
simplest form, you can’t really tease out all its complex
permutations. I think by the time I started my practice in
1990 I was very much attuned to the sequence of how
these ideas could, in a practical sense, be implemented.

GL: When did the transformable idea come up? Is it

something you’ve always thought about, or… What
triggered it?

CH: When questions like yours are asked, you try to find
an exemplary moment—when a thought starts—but it
can always be traced to an earlier thought, maybe in a
different form. At Cooper Union I was making kinetic
sculpture. I was studying a lot with Hans Haacke and he
encouraged me in a very nice way to explore art-making
without being confined by the strict parameters of what
art should look like. What that afforded me was the
opportunity to really explore movement and mechanisms,
and get into that whole approach, without labelling it as a
more technological exploration or a more aesthetic
exploration. But all that thinking was put on hold when I
went to Columbia, which was very much a move to
consider the technical side of what I was doing. I had
suspended any notion of what it was I really wanted to
make. I still had a lot of creative interests but wasn’t
pursuing them very hard. It was really after I graduated
from Columbia and began to work at Honeybee Robotics,
where, on a professional level, I had the chance as a
young mechanical engineer to deal with different clients
and different industries. We were doing work for air
conditioning plants, for food manufacturers and for virtual
vision systems and end effectors for robots. Through my
old boss Stephen Gorovan we also made contact with the
space agency, with NASA. At that time NASA was very
interested in using robots to build in space. There were a
lot of different ideas for the International Space Station,
and robotic construction was very much a part of it. So
we worked with NASA to conceptualize construction
processes with robots and to help them set up test beds
with industrial robots to try out some of these ideas.
Sometime during that period—I won’t say it was because
of NASA, as it seemed to arrive in a parallel fashion—I
was exposed to what NASA calls “deployable structures.”
Rather than building a structure in space, you would
unfold a structure in space. That really triggered the initial
thinking—how do you design deployable, transformable,
pop-up objects that change themselves by themselves?
How do you think about making them? But also really,
how do you even think about them?
The computer was used to accelerate the geometrical calculations and …
to produce precise technical drawings. Because Hoberman’s thinking derives
from mathematics, he used a software language embedded in AutoCAD
software (then being used in architecture and design offices), called
AutoLISP, to customize standard drawing operations. The handmade
drawings and geometrical annotations predate the coded instructions that
were input in the computer. Instead of relying on the very primitive animation
software of the time to study transformations, Hoberman used AutoLISP code
to study motion between interacting parts.

1/

GL: You were speaking of using AutoCAD as a two-

dimensional tool in robotics. When you started your
practice in the 1990s, which software programs did you
use to deal with this problem of transformable structures?

CH: In the 1980s and 1990s I did a great deal of coding

myself, I guess probably using some version of BASIC or
FORTRAN (pretty much standard engineering
programming language) to explore kinetic designs—even
while using AutoCAD, because AutoCAD was a
rudimentary 2D tool at that point. If I ever wanted to do a
3D visualization I would usually do the programming for
working through the three-dimensional structure, but also
write the code so it would display on screen in a three-
dimensional format with hidden line removal shading. I
would read graphics texts and translate it into code so
these programs, which would become quite long, could
be customized to make a particular type of folding shape,
and where I could, input different parameters to explore
different design variations. In a certain way, nowadays, it
seems slightly ridiculous to put all that effort into what
were very non-standard design issues. Some were
absolutely standardized, displaying a form on the screen,
but at the time I was reviewing practical choices of what I
could and couldn’t do, and those were the best options.
You and I were just talking a minute ago about Silicon
Graphics. There was a point in the early 1990s when I
had some friends at SGI, or friends who had friends at
SGI—I don’t remember which—and I had one of those
$50,000 machines as a loaner. I worked on… actually,
what was the particular graphics package, what it was
called…?

GL: It had a Unix language called IRIX.

CH: IRIX—yeah. I did some work with that, but it was

cumbersome because there was just a very steep
learning curve to it. But then Autodesk, of course, kept
advancing their tools. I can’t remember exactly when true
3D was readily available, and at that point I was able to
do a lot of my designs using AutoCAD. But to achieve the
functionality, to basically work through what, in effect,
was this three-dimensional transformative kinematics, I
did a lot of scripting within the AutoCAD environment
using AutoLISP as the in-package language. I’m at the
point now where I don’t have the time to learn all the new
tools, but I kind of understand it from the perspective that
it’s basically design-by-algorithm—which is my
simpleminded way of saying what I think of parametric
design. It’s something I was familiar with from day one,
and it was by necessity, not by choice.

Hoberman was among the earliest to adopt …

… 3D printing technology. The ability to digitally model complex hinges and
connectors in 3D and then print them, often in their final position so as to
avoid assembly, was used to develop and engineer mechanisms at a smaller
scale in plastic than was possible using CNC routers in aluminum.

1/

GL: Were other people experimenting in the same way

then, who you shared these experiences with? Or was it
specific to your work—something quite unique in this
respect?

CH: I think my approach is very much tailored to the type

of structures that I design, so in that sense there was a
certain uniqueness to it. Basically, my approach was
always somewhere between designing forms and
designing mecha-nisms. I’m over-simplifying severely, but
you certainly could find design programs to design form.
Then there were engineering packages with which you
could design mechanisms. The complexity of the
mechanisms that I was working with—and the way they
had to resolve themselves in a mathematical sense—
didn’t work well for standard mechanisms packages. To
some degree it still doesn’t, so I had to kind of thread my
way in-between. So how I would interact with all these
different tools was very utilitarian. If I had a project where
I wanted to make an expanding sphere of 1,500
individual machined pieces, that had to be suspended
and that could open and close—which had not been
done before—I was kind of saying, “What do I need to do
that?” My manufacturing partner in this, Bill Record, had
this famously-named company, Zengineering, up in
Saugerties, New York. He was basically refurbishing these
digital machining centres as an opportunity to get very
expensive equipment in some state of disrepair, then
bring it back into working order. He would program in G-
code to make these parts. That’s still the basis of
machining today. But at the time, we would cobble
together a front end so that my designs would, in fact,
flow seamlessly into his machine. So it was CAD/CAM,
but there was always something of a home-brew quality
to it, driven by economics more than anything else. I
mean, a lot of stuff was around then for the types of
things I needed to do; they just weren’t accessible unless
you worked for a big company. As far as the Hollywood
software side of it—that’s been a huge and very
interesting driver as to how computers play out as design
tools in these other realms—I always had a bit of an
ambivalent relationship to it. On the one hand, I love that
capacity to create visions and to see them do all kinds of
imaginative things—it revolutionizes our perception of
what is possible. On the other hand I was kind of on the
side, saying, “Yes, but I do special effects in real life.
They have to work.” I don’t have time for it, but that’s
because really, if I was to spend the time seriously
visualizing what I did, that would take almost as much
time as to actually do it. Of course, that’s all changed
now. On every level of manufacturing visualization,
parametrics, the tools are beyond what I certainly could
have imagined at the time. And equally, the talented
people who use these tools, it’s like a generation has
grown up now, having integrated this into their thinking
and approach. To me, that’s just as important—now
designers have had enough time with these tools to use
them in ways that are actually interesting. Back then the
tools had a kind of grittier existence. You had to really
struggle with them, I think, on every level.
The interplay between minute components of different …
… expandable and foldable structures was explored through study models
realized in different materials such as paper, cardboard, metal, wood and
plastic. Small models were used to retrofit and alter the coding sequences
that were developed in parallel on the computer and then changed again
according to data.

1/

GL: Was CATIA or any other aerospace software looking at

transformable objects as complex as you were doing?

CH: CATIA and Pro/ENGINEER and these really heavy-

duty engineering programs were industrial quality. The
complexity of designing a 747, is so many orders of
magnitude above what I was doing, so in a sense there
was nothing that those programs couldn’t do. On the
other hand, they did so many things that I didn’t want.
And the thing that I did want to do—it’s a slightly arcane
issue but is salient in my world. My structures are what
you would call an over-constrained mechanism, meaning
that they operate due to very specific geometries. But
from a mechanisms design point of view they shouldn’t
operate because they’re over-constrained; they have too
many connections. That became a mathematical issue in
terms of what the mechanisms programs could and
couldn’t do. To a degree, it still is an issue. Basically if
you designed my structures within a classical
mechanisms program, it simply wouldn’t operate because
they wouldn’t satisfy the equations of the program—you
always had to do these workarounds. So there was a lot of
motivation to grow special tools for myself. They would
usually have a couple of users; they were customized
tools for projects, in effect.

GL: I was interested in the exchange between you and

Bill at that point. You were experimenting. Was Bill
experimenting?

CH: I guess you could describe it that way. It was kind of

a classic designer-fabricator relationship in the sense that
I pretty much knew the intention of what we were trying
to build and Bill was able to break it down into steps and
stages and processes to get it done. Frankly, that’s the
way I continue to work. But it’s more internalized now
with staff. It’s in my nature, as an engineer. I’m process-
oriented myself. I’ll push for a creative idea without really
having a clue of how to get it made. Usually I’ve got some
notion, and then other people with better ideas come
along—so it can be an extremely dynamic development
process.
This selection of pictures illustrates different phases of the early …
… prototyping experiments Hoberman conducted in collaboration with Bill
Record’s workshop in upstate New York. The shape and dimension of all
elements of the expanding sphere were transmitted from digital data to CNC
router tables where aluminum billet stock was digitally manufactured at a
1:1 scale. Hoberman and Record often empirically tested the weight and
construction technology at full scale. A scissor-like hinge is the basic
operative principle of the structures designed by Hoberman. Pairs of hinges
are then joined with common pivots, allowing for synchronized movement
that also guarantees the structures do not collapse. Large prototypes that
could exhibit inertia, dead-weight, friction and other physical effects due to
material, scale and mass were built with Bill Record as an integral part of
the engineering and design process. Much of Hoberman’s early research was
dedicated to defining the form and dimension of the hinge to perfect the
smoothness of movement, crucial to the functionality of the structures.

1/

GL: In the era we’re looking at now, offices like Buro

Happold played an important role for a few of the
architects because they had the computer technology
that facilitated dimensional control, which is a term I
would now—looking back—use very loosely. But you
would get centreline of structure or some geometric
wireframe, and then lay pin-bars over it or do all kinds of
crazy things to add material thickness. I vividly remember
your work being the first to not only look at geometric
transformation, but at how material thickness and
collisions and mechanisms and all these things played
into it. Specifically with the folding book, I remember you
saying in a discussion, “Well, it’s a material that you’re
folding, so you’ve got to make sure to handle the material
and not just the geometry.” So I think you’ve already said
it once; that you look at geometry and you look at
mechanism—it’s one thing to have a transforming
geometry and it’s another thing to have a transforming
mechanism. How do you think in those two worlds
digitally?

CH: Well, at Columbia my concentration within the

mechanical engineering department was mechanism
design. It’s built in to the discipline that mechanism
designers work through those issues. They do a kind of a
wireframe trajectory level, and then there are steps to
translate that into physical implementation. For me, the
digital side of it was very much a tool to facilitate
physicalizing an idea. The making part of it was primary.
How I would get there was kind of… Well, I knew where I
wanted to go and I would find ways to do that. So I had to
force the issue of allowing for materiality in the general
sense. I’ve always been interested in two different sides of
making physical, transformable objects. One is what we
might call “exact solutions”: the sphere is an exact
solution. You can have a wireframe geometry that
basically goes through its transformation process on the
computer in a very idealized way. All centrelines remain
true; there’s no accommodation for material flexibility,
etc.; you have to allow for material thickness ultimately
just to build it—but that was kind of built into my
methods to get there. In the other direction things are
softer, and that requires a certain degree of
accommodation on the material side. Those are much
more difficult to model on the computer, and I’ve simply
done less of it. Probably for that reason: It’s harder to
predict. So a folding paper model doesn’t have a true
absolute centreline geometric representation unless the
paper is of zero thickness, which it’s not. But that whole
area of flexure or softer materials, making complex
mechanisms or trying to fabricate them out of fewer
pieces so that you work with “living hinges” and “self-
integrated connections”—that’s a really very interesting
frontier in terms of digitization.

GL: When you would work either mechanically, or just in

your head, when you’re thinking it through;
if you have a
part that has two extremes of motion and that part gets
iterated in some array, how do you test it out? What’s the
process, or what was it back then and what is it now?
The expanding sphere model is operated by an …
… electric engine that allows its overall movement and the complex
geometrical interplay of its component parts to be seen. Its mechanism is
based on pivotal joints that tolerate synchronized movement and maintain
the overall curvilinear form in different con figurations. The drawings are
manually drafted instances of the sphere mechanism at different phases of
expansion, from compact to fully open. In fact, the sphere is an
icosidodecahedron, a polyhedron with twenty triangular faces and twelve
pentagonal faces; its elements are six large circles that correspond to the
edges of the polyhedron.

1/

CH: If I could have listened to myself today and some of

the things that I said to justify some of the things that I
built, I probably would have thrown myself out of the
room—which my clients didn’t do, and I hope they don’t
regret that. Testing and validation is critical. For any
project I work on, there’s always a lot at stake. Some are
quite big budget, some less, but in any case it’s always a
significant issue. Nobody wants to pay for my or anybody
else’s experimentation. It’s not the way private industry, in
the sense of a design firm, works. I think you understand
that and have probably lived it too. I guess I have an
aspiration to be in a certain kind of engineering tradition
that is producing new types of structural art. There’s a
technological, scientific spirit of making discoveries and
pushing forward. It’s rational, and there’s hopefully
lucidity to the thinking behind it, but insofar as it is
pioneering, new things are untested by definition. You
can build a certain amount of testing into their
development, but that is constrained by the project
parameters, funding schedule, all kind of different things
—so there’s a tension. I’ve lived it my whole career: The
desire to innovate, to make something new; and the
terrible fear that I’ve gone too far, that it won’t work. I
think there’s a popular misconception about engineering
in general that it’s a bloodless, rational exercise; that the
answers are out there and you simply have to dig a little
bit to pull them out—then put them on the table and say,
“Well, that’s the answer to your question of will it or won’t
it work.” The truth is more nuanced: Things work
because people make them work, not because they were
destined to work. It’s about a rational assessment of risk,
and it’s a humanistic endeavour. Different people have
written about the sort of engineering spirit; in that tension
between a lucid approach to innovation and risk and all
of these other things, you actually learn something. You
gain insight. And part of that is embodied in better tools
that exist in the computer. You have your different
methods, whether through design or analytics. The
computer tells you something, but really a lot of it is
judging from what you learn over time. That was a long-
winded answer to a question about testing, but I think the
making side is a big part of it. Because we physically
make things. Even making digital models today, we fall
short of a full-service simulation of these structures; so
there’s a lot we learn. Usually we separate out kinematics
(the motion aspect) from the structural, so when we do a
big structure and it needs analysis, we tend to apply a
kind of a snapshot method. We look at it in a series of
stages. Usually our partners, Buro Happold or another
structural engineering firm, do that part. We don’t have
an in-house structural team. Then we look at the motion
part. Ideally you would put both together in a full
dynamics simulation, where you could really look at all of
these very, very complex phenomena of interaction. But
the effort blows up at a certain point. Frankly, you don’t
need the full simulation, because you have that insight,
you’ve got that sense in your gut. Like, well I need to go
this far, but I don’t need to go as far as that. There’s a
point where the detail overwhelms your understanding.
These drawings present the geometrical functionality …
… of the Iris Dome. The intention of this research was to use scissor-like
hinges, analogous to the scissor gates used as early elevator doors, to
achieve three-dimensional expansion and retraction. The project name makes
reference to the camera’s iris shutter, which only operates in two dimensions.

1/

GL: On the quality of the spectacle of motion, which

you’re definitely in the business of …

CH: I am.

GL: In the Aha! moment of seeing a thing change—what’s

the role of spectacle? What about engineering a
spectacle; at what size is it most interesting? And also,
because this is a digitally-focused discussion, does
spectacle come out of the digital world at all? Because we
can get certain things on a screen now, do we expect our
buildings to transform somehow because of that? Those
are a lot of questions…
CH: Well, certainly the notion of making a physical object
that can morph between states has a kind of a digital
inspiration, but this inspiration could also be biological.
My aspiration in any kind of broader program is not to do
a series of examples of transformable objects, but to
systematize and codify and develop methods so that you
have an option to make them transformable, if you like. In
that sense, when they introduced the idea of morphing in
Terminator 2 (1991), the guy’s going to turn from human
to robot, to shape shift or whatever. That was certainly a
shift in the zeitgeist for me, and may-be for other people,
in terms of saying, “Yeah, why shouldn’t a chair turn into
a motorcycle?” Why not? And for me the only problem is
—that’s just up on the screen. Gee, that’s cheap, you
know? But when you go from the digital into biology, well,
biology has it all figured out. We’re all sitting here in
bodies that have smoothly transformed over however
many years. You can look at D’Arcy Thompson’s drawings
of the species [On Growth and Form, 1917], with their
differential scaling to show the intrinsic change and
morphology for adaptation and survival. From a design
standpoint, it’s interesting that there’s an implied
functionality to shape shift. Within the natural world, you
can find these incredible species that transform
themselves in a matter of seconds. If I were hubristic, I’d
say, “Let’s take the best of nature: that it’s physical, and
the best of digital: That you can design it, and find a way
to do that!” But I’m only a poor mechanisms designer;
just trying to force it through—nuts and bolts and
materials—but imaginatively. So you were asking: Is there
a digital inspiration for this? Absolutely. And in the cultural
sense, it’s not only utilitarian. One aspect of media culture
is that there’s this endless topping of the visual. It keeps
getting topped, and keeps getting topped. I guess I keep
waiting for a point of diminishing returns. Now for
spectacle… I work in different sectors and in some ways
I’m a commercial animal. I try to assimilate the needs of
the client and the project in terms of what creatively
interests me. The biggest structures that we’ve done have
been for live entertainment: the two biggest were a
curtain for the Olympics [Salt Lake City, 2002], and a
transformable screen for U2 [360° Tour, 2009]. Bigger is
better. I’d like to think that technology is not the most
important thing in the work that I do—design is more
important. There needs to be some kind of balance as to
how much you’re going for wow factor and how much for
an experience that integrates into a larger whole. And
getting that balance is really key. There are things I’ve
done that I think went too far in the direction of brute
force technology; aesthetically too far. But I don’t think
I’m unusual in that sense, in that I’m a designer trying to
be sensitive to context and experience. But the
transformation side of it, I think, has a real potential. It
seems like we’re still at an early stage in terms of
understanding what spectacles are appropriate for what
type of experiences. One thing we haven’t really spoken
about is real-time control, and that the movement itself
was a digital expression. I was always working with
programmable motion systems. Not hydraulics, with a
button that you press on and off, but programming
environments themselves. I personally spent a fair
amount of time acquiring these motor control packages,
integrating them with the mechanics and then
programming them for clients. This is the area where I
feel I really didn’t exploit digital technologies enough,
historically. Usually for these projects I would create a
mechanical wonder that had all the motion and aesthetic
qualities I was interested in; and then kind of while
panting across the finish line: “Oh, what exactly do I want
it to do?” I would sit down at the computer and come up
with something in time for the opening. The client would
say, “That’s pretty good.” And like, okay… it tended to
end there.

The research on reversibly expandable structures focused …

… to understand how to realize structures that can vary in shape and size,
was translated into several US patents registered under the name of Charles
Hoberman. These patents include precise drawings detailing the overall
spatial formations as well as the form and dimension of individual joints and
trusses. The exhibited patent 5,024,031 presents a summary of Hoberman’s
approach, including spheres and iris domes.

1/

GL: Also, having the transformable structure as a toy is

the most powerful thing you could ever do, in my opinion.
I’ve always thought that. When I saw the sphere as a toy, I
thought, well—that’ll change everything faster than
anything else. Robert Stern having a television show
changes culture faster than any book or exhibition; you
having a transformable structure for kids… I mean, the
Erector Set, the Lincoln Log, all of those things totally
frame the way you think — CH: I can’t say it was
premeditated.

GL: But it’s actually evil of you! Generations of people

expect stuff to move in a way they wouldn’t have
previously.

CH: Well, yes… I’ve certainly seen that with the toy—it
goes from people reacting, just, like, “Whoa!” Now it’s:
“I’ve seen that.”

Demonstration of 1.8 meter diameter aluminum sphere. 1990.

Project Credits
Expanding Sphere / Iris Dome
Designers
Hoberman Associates, New York City
Chuck Hoberman
Fabricator
Zengineering, Bill Record
Engineering
Steven Glapa

Engineering Support
Erich Blohm All materials from Chuck Hoberman fonds,
CCA

Series concept
CCA Publications and Linked by Air
Editor
Greg Lynn
Editorial coordination
Jesse Seegers
Text editing and proofreading
Victoria Bugge Oeye

Kari Rittenbach

Katie Moore
Transcription
Christiane Côté
Rights and Reproductions
Marc Pitre
Design and development
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Tro Piliguian
Robert Rabinovitch
Gerald Sheff The Oral History project launched by the
CCA to document the different phases of Archaeology of
the Digital has been supported by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey
Brown. The CCA would also like to thank Hydro-Québec,
the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications, the
Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts de
Montréal.

© 2014 Canadian Centre for Architecture

ISBN 978-1-927071-08-3

Published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture

1920 rue Baile

Montréal, Québec

Canada H3H 2S6

www.cca.qc.ca


A software package (CAD is an acronym of Computer Aided Design )

available since 1982, which emerged from a software package called
MicroCAD, developed by Mike Riddle on an IBM Personal Computer at
his local Computerland store during closed hours.
A German-American artist, living and working in New York, known for
his work as a conceptual artist. Much of his work focuses on systems
and processes, and notable works include Condensation Cube (1965-
2008), MoMA Poll (1970) Shapolsky, et al. Manhattan Real Estate
Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971).

A programming language interpreter based on XLISP which was

included in AutoCAD Release 2.1, first commercially available in 1986,
allowing third party software developers to extend AutoCAD’s
functionality. Like any language, Lisp (or LISP) has multiple dialects and
pidgin versions, XLISP being one of them, and is self-reflexively even
named after a type of speech impediment.

A family of general-purpose computer programming languages invented

in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College.

A concatenation of Formula Translating System, FORTRAN is a

programming language originally developed by IBM in the 1950s, used
especially for numeric computation and scientific computing.

A company founded in California by Jim Clark in 1982 that produced

hardware and software focusing on 3D graphics display terminals. In
the early 1990’s SGI released the IRIS Crimson which was the first 64-
bit workstation.

The original UNIX was developed at AT&T’s Bell Labs research center in
the 1970’s. It is a general purpose, multi-user operating system which
has over time evolved into multiple versions, and is now owned by The
Open Group, a computer industry standards consortium.

An operating system developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) in 1988.

IRIX is a portmanteau of IRIs (Integrated Raster Imaging System) and
uniX. In a Usenet message in 1999 on the meaning of IRIS, SGI
Founder Jim Clark wrote that his secretary “had a picture of an Iris on
her bulletin board. I was reviewing the draft when I discovered that SUN
Microsystems had been formed. SUN had always meant Stanford
University Network, and ‘SUN Terminal’ was sprinkled throughout my
paper. I said I’d be damned if I was going to give the impression that the
Geometry Engine was part of SUN Microsystems, so I had to quickly
come up with a new name, since the paper had to be sent in that day.
Whimsical ‘Apple’ worked, so why wouldn’t ‘Iris.’” On September 6,
2006, SGI announced the end of development for the IRIX operating
system.

Officially incorporated on April 26, 1982 in California, Autodesk is a

software company founded by John Walker, who co-authored its best-
known software, AutoCAD.

An engineering and fabrication company in upstate New York that

fabricated Chuck Hoberman`s aluminum prototypes with CNC milling
machines. It is run by Bill Record, who also used to run a trans-African
motorcycle-safari business.

A type of computer programming language used for computerized

numerical control of machines. Used mostly for digital fabrication, the
code essentially tells a machine what to make and how to make it.

A commonly used acronym for Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided

Manufacturing.

An acronym for Computer Aided Three-dimensional Interactive

Application is a software package developed by French company
Dassault Systèmes. In 1984 Boeing chose CATIA V3 as its main 3D CAD
tool, and in 1988 CATIA was ported from large mainframe computers to
the UNIX operating system which ran on smaller personal computers.

Often abbreviated to Pro/E, this software package was a 3D

CAD/CAM/CAE program created by Parametric Technology Corporation
(PTC). It ran on Windows, and was renamed PTC Creo in 2010.

An engineering firm founded by Sir Edmund “Ted” Happold after he left

Ove Arup in 1976 known for engaging collaborations with architects.
A science fiction action film directed by James Cameron in which a
robot assassin T-1000 attempts to kill John Connor but (spoiler alert) is
saved by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, the T-800 Terminator. The
film included very sophisticated (at the time) computer graphics
imagery (CGI): although the computer graphics sequence totalled less
than five minutes of film, they took 25 man years of work.

In this treatise Thompson demonstrated correlations between biological

forms and mechanical phenomena. Partially influenced by the work of
Albrecht Durer, especially chapter XVII “The comparison of related
FORMS” based on mathematical transformations, it attempts to explain
processes by which patterns are formed throughout plant and animal
growth.

Was a worldwide stadium concert tour to support U2’s album No Line

on the Horizon. It included 110 concerts over two years. New York
Times popular music critic Jon Pareles described the band’s stage,
designed by Mark Fisher, as “a claw-like, spired structure that’s part
insect, part spacecraft, part cathedral.”
true
Chuck Hoberman
1.