Aranda\Lasch lecture

A passion for geometry and logic propels Aranda\Lasch’s “quest for the endless.” Founded by Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch in 2003, the firm has offices in New York City and Tucson. Blending history and storytelling (“reaching backward as a way to move forward”) with design driven by computation and algorithm, the pair’s interest in fractals and quasicrystals is evident in their projects, which often grow from one repeating module or form.

In their Emerging Voices lecture, the pair details the evolution of their work from installations, sculpture, and furniture to their first two buildings now in development. Past projects include The Morning Line, a site-specific sound sculpture created in collaboration with artist Matthew Ritchie; 1774, a solid aluminum chair that recognizes two significant moments from that year — the death of Louis XV and the discovery of manganese; and Rules of Six, a three-dimensional wall installation commissioned by MoMA that explores the notion of self-assembly. Now under construction in Miami’s Design District is the Art Deco Building, a commercial building whose textured façade draws from motifs of the city’s iconic architecture. Also in development is the Palais des Arts in Libreville, Gabon, a canopied outdoor theater that uses a single repeated, extruded element to create a spiraling series of surfaces. Projects of every scale draw from the same theoretical underpinnings, including a particular interest in the ruin that exemplifies a “strange obsession right now with the way things get put together and the way they fall apart.”

Recorded: March 5, 2015