ELECTROFORM(ALISM) MASTERS, SUBSTRATES AND THE RULES OF ATTRACTION
TAUBMAN COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE + URBAN PLANNING RESEARCH THROUGH MAKING 2013
CONTENTS Introduction
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What’s the Appeal
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Backstory
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Technique
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The Lab
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Blobby Tile
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Horny Tile
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Tankini
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Lacey
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Patina
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Team
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Thank you
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Electroform(alism) is a collaborative research project made possible through a Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning Research Through Making Grant. Anya Sirota, Jean Louis Farges, Patrick Beaucé, Alex Belykh, Nathan Doud, John Guinn featured graphicist, Brittany Gacsy
INTRODUCTION Electroform(alism) is a an ongoing collaborative experiment. It explores hybrid ways of making, coupling nineteenth century plating techniques with contemporary fabrication. Think Victorians meet digital design. Technically, aesthetically, materially and economically, the possibilities are exciting, luxurious, and dare we say, liberating.
The wager for us was double. Up front we sought to generate novel metallurgical environments, structural fabrics, articulated skins - the stuff design dreams are made of. But perhaps more importantly, we wanted to imagine a new mode of small scale fabrication, one that could be adaptive, nomadic, modest, yet generative. A method that could be shared, rigged, but not pinched, repeated but not mass produced.
To re-imagine electroplating as an intrepid, present-day process we would need to become familiar with traditional galvanoplasty, or the techniques involved in the production and replication of metallic objects on a master form. Then, we would proceed to test new composites and micro-structures using permanent, expendable, and embedded substrates.
The project brought together an inimitable group of makers, designers, students, and fabricators who collectively built a mobile lab and tested a series of speculative processes. These are the notes on a work in progress. We hope you enjoy.
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WHAT’S THE APPEAL? Electroforming is so appealing. And there are many reasons why. This is our laundry list. It is by no means complete. But it aims to explain our attraction to the method fabrication - its intrepid possibilities and generative potentials - beyond the brazen draw of bling. Though, like ravens, we do like shiny things.
depends on the size of the tank and the amount of electrolyte material it can hold. In our case, we started with the approximate tank the size of a garbage can. Actually, we started with a garbage can. And this allowed us to experiment with artifacts about a foot squared. Reason two: IT’S MOLECULAR! Electroplating is a chemical process which works at the molecular level. Metal particles move from the ingot and deposit on a master or substrate – and this happens gradually – which is just super. It allows for the buildup of material to a precise thickness over time. Meaning plated components can be designed and engineered to a specified tensile strength with virtually zero waste. It also means that recyclability is embedded in the very logic of
Reason one: SIZE DOESN’T MATTER. The gamut of scales at which electroplating can be deployed makes working with virtually any size unit possible. In the nineteenth century plated cutlery was all the rage. During World War II, Americans plated entire submarines in Detroit’s automotive manufacturing facilities, producing virtually infallible metal monocoques. And everything in between can be plated as well. The scale of the project
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the process. The insufficiently beautiful, the structurally flawed and the not so endearingly fugly can be tossed back in the tank and put back to work as source material for a new deposit.
method for economic resilience; a way of making that is greater in scope and enterprise. On the other spectrum, mass production is ubiquitous and prosaic. As a rule of thumb, it invariably culminates in outsourcing. Accepting that the misnamed post-industrial phase is simply a global market shift toward more exuberant material extraction, it’s safe to say that manufacturing competition is fierce out there. And regions uninhibited by labor laws and other civic constraints possess a preemptive economic advantage when it comes in making lots of things in big quantities.
Reason three: WE LOVE SHORT RUN PRODUCTION. Electroforming favors short run production over the artisanal and mass manufactured. Artisanal craft emphasizes the auratic value of the one-off. This can be very nice. Beautiful, really. But value is produced in the private exchange between a patron and a craftsperson, which is terrific as a single instance of preindustrial exchange. As a strategy, however, we’re interested in delivering a generative
So while electroforming can certainly be used when making a single artifact or a large mass produced run, it is smaller scale industrial fabrication that’s privileged by the method.
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SIZE DOESN’T MATTER
IT’S MOLECULAR!
Where casting and sheet metal forming require a minimum run to compensate for the production of an expensive mold or master cast, electroforming can be deliberately frugal and foxy.
Reason #5: SLOW COOKING MAKES THINGS DELICIOUS. We like leisure. And we’re interested in reducing the compulsion of labor, whether real, symbolic or imaginary. Where hyper-articulated aggregation is dependent upon low cost sweet equity or free labor, electroforming can be deployed toward the production of the snap in – simple interlocking units that connect with the unfussiness of tiles. And so the advantage of working with plating as a fabrication technique recalls the logic of a crock pot. Choose the right ingredients, the right proportion, and let the process go.
Reason #4: NOMADIC FABRICATION. Electroplating facilities can be compact and mobile, as small and itinerant as the sum of their component parts. Depending on the desired output, the facility can be transported with relative ease. All you need is a source of current, the rectifier, a plastic garbage can and you’re ready to plate. Collapsing the distance between the site of fabrication and installation allows for a certain level of demonstrative pageantry. Making (as) spectacle. We imagine deploying the nomadic fabrication facility in multiple scenarios: within industrial sites, adjacent to facades under construction, at the Astana International Biennale’s American pavilion.
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WE HEART SHORT RUN PRODUCTION
NOMADIC FABRICATION FOR ALL
BACKSTORY The ascendancy of electroforming as a mode of metal fabrication was irrepressible. It fulfilled the Victorian era’s insatiable enthusiasm for industrial ingenuity, superficial beautification and economical manufacture. By the 1860’s the process, well-suited to Beaux- Arts sensibilities, was deployed in the production of saturated, figurative ornamentation and monumental sculpture.
parts for high density “baby” submarines, antenna masts, molds for explosives, radar and electronic components, and so on, with much of the manufacturing taking place in Detroit, Michigan. Eventually, however, with the rise of Modernist visual austerity, postwar distrust for mimetic public cenotaphs, advancements in offset printing, and shifts in the global labor market, electroforming became relegated to the realm of a small group of experts and craft specialists working with architectural conservation, heritage curation, exquisite art objects and jewelry design.
Over the span of close to a century, cathedrals, operas and institutional buildings in Europe and the United States were populated with articulated bronze effigies to preeminent national personalities and other worthwhile fictions. On the market, the method made refined but attainable objects of consumer desire available in an array of possible simulacra: romantic, orientalist, or decorative. And, in perhaps the most ubiquitous operation, the printing and engraving trades customized the technique in the production of electrotyped copper plates, which replaced wood block as the standard method in the production of letter forms.
An aside: Now as with all significant industrial inventions, Electroform’s origin story is polemical, with several inventors claiming title to the method. Moritz von Jacobi , a Prussian scientist in Saint Petersburg, Russia, is generally credited with the discovery of electroforming in 1838. With the financial assistance and limitless enthusiasm of Czar Nicholas, he published an account of his experimentation in a text titled ‘Die Galvanoplastik’. The method fed well into Russia’s taste for baroque ornamentation. Within half a century, aided by the advent of the electric generator, guilds and labor unions had formed around the practice.
In the twentieth century electroforming was co-opted by the military for industrial fabrication of highly accurate and stable 18
TECHNIQUE Electroforming is a deceptively simple process. It’s produced through the deployment of a series of variable and contingent components - matrix material, chemical bath, and substrate – impacted by time and scale.
The outward straightforwardness of the process disguises the extraordinary range of metallurgical effects that can be achieved through the adjustment of the matrix mix, plating bath composition, and conditions of the depositor, allowing for the production of components that cannot be realized via sheet metal fabrication techniques. The operation allows for unmatched dimensional accuracy, thin material sections, complex curvatures, shapes and refined detailing with no limit to the size of the object that can be electroformed.
Conventionally, the practice begins with a mold, or master, whose surface is made conducting with a thin coat of graphite powder or paint. A wire is attached to the conducting surface and the mold is suspended in an electrolyte solution. Electro-deposition of the material - typically alloy foil, silver, nickel, or copper - onto the mold is activated using electrical currents. When the mold is coated to the desired thickness, the object is removed from the bath and divorced, partially or totally, from the original mold.
Most exciting, however, is that an electrodeposit can be applied to virtually any solid material: aluminum, zinc, nickel, stainless steel, invar, Kovar, glass, plastic, wood, foam,
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or synthetic fiber. The process can be deployed progressively, building up fine layers of multiple metal matrices in order to achieve the desired finish, tensile strength and complex form.
weight; substrate fabrics like Kevlar could yield composites with incredible tensile strength at nominal thicknesses. Given electroplating technical potentials, our roughly broke down into three categories for testing:
Electroforming differs greatly from metalworking techniques such as punching and milling in that it produces virtually no waste other than the substrate material which, if strategically considered, remains at the core of the finished product and enhances the structural performance of the composite.
(1)NEW SUBSTRATES The creation of new substrates will be evaluated according to their aesthetic, physical, and economic qualities. Permanent, expendable and embedded masters will be assessed according to the accuracy they yield in the electrodeposition process as well as the performance characteristics they offer to the resultant material composite.
The continued existence of the substrate, embedded within the final metalized object, offers a particularly fertile area for study within the broader scope of the project. As in reinforced concrete, these composite constructions can combine the positive performance characteristics of both materials. Electroformed structural foams could combine visual mass and scale with very minimal
Engaging contemporary digital design and fabrication techniques, the research will test materials and operations involving pleating, surface mesh, and aggregate modeling. CNC milled foam and CNC
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cut fabrics will serve as experimental substrates, among other materials.
to explore the effects produced through multiple metal depositions, including layering and admixing, and to experiment with modes of progressive intervention, such as draping, cutting, and drilling. Finally the substrates and electroform prototypes will be tested to determine their tensile and compressive strengths.
The material from which substrates can be generated is almost limitless, and includes metals, plastics, rubber, fabric, leather, sealed wood and plaster. The only restrictions imposed on the suitability of substrates are that they are able to withstand corrosion from mild acids and are non-absorptive when immersed in solutions.
(3)COMPOSITES AND MICROSTRUCTURES The spatial application of the research will be evaluated based on the geometric constraints and the physical parameters of the test material produced. Deploying the composite generated, we intend to explore the architectural and industrial design potential through a series of applications. Building skins, interior surfaces, partitions, and enclosures will be considered as potential components for micro-structures, foregrounding craft and deliberate design intent in the production of physical texture, material efficiency, and optical effect.
(2)METHODS OF MANIPULATION Critical to the project is the idea that experimentation, interruption and manipulation of the electroform process can lead to unexpected methods of making. The intention is to test new substrates by considering the time, mass, conductivity and general dimensional characteristics of the material, to test weaving, pleating, lace, modeling and folding as modes of formal manipulation,
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Marc Cunnif, JC Gorham, RI
THE LAB To begin testing, we would need a laboratory. So we built one: an adjustable, mobile copper plating unit that could be broken down into an 8’x8’ base module, with 4’x8’ additional expansion modules. We were thinking ahead. Maybe our enterprise would grow.
bus bars, anodes, light gauge copper wire, electro-conductive paint, containers, copper electroforming solution, rinsing bath, safety goggles, aprons, shelves with base matrices, electroclean solution, replenishing brightener, acid dip solution, red lacquer, small pump, or other solution agitation devices.
The chamber needed an exhaust fan in the ceiling, a floor of 60-mil EPDM liner (to catch any electrolyte spills). The unit, placed on casters, could be relocated easily within a facility. It could also be broken down and transported to an alternate fabrication site, exploring the idea of a nomadic fabrication unit.
We purchased the components second hand in Rhode Island, where the hard hit jewelry industry has flooded the market with industrial remnants and tools. Then we trucked the parts back to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and set up the fabrication facility in a barn on Warren Road.
Inside: a lined tank, a 10 amp rectifier, clamps and lead set heavy gauge wire for
The testing was tricky. It was easy to over cook by cranking the voltage too high.
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Get the levels in the solution all wrong and the copper doesn’t take. Estimate flow improperly and one side of end of the substrate might grow a sprout, or worse, a cauliflower. Make the master too deep, or textured and the process won’t take... Experiments with materials that failed as substrates. Each test took time and patience. For the amateur, the process is finicky. And it is difficult to isolate exactly which components are all wrong or need to be just slightly adjusted.
generative. The productive tests have names: Blobby Tile, Horney Tile, Tankini, Lacey. In the winter we added insulation and a small electrical heater. A family of racoons settled on top.
But the lab allowed us for to test a tremendous matrix of possible substrates in order to explore new material and fabrication possibilities. Of the myriad of experiments that we initiated four emerged as particularly
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BLOBBY TILE In developing the blobby tile series we were interested in maximizing variation while relying on a single interlocking unit. Each simple component is identical in plan. The units are designed in clusters of three discrete topographies in order to suggest the possibility of a heterogeneous field. Borrowing from the logic of arabesque geometric patterning systems, we developed a catalogue of tile species in 90 plus adaptations – each concerned with the production and perception of heightened discrepancy, but bound by the logics of economic plausibility and frugality.
cost replication techniques. We turned to vacuformed styrene plates produced from cnc milled medium density fiber board in order to diffuse the cost of the original mill-work over the span of the production run. Variation in the blobby tile color palette is achieved by allowing copper to tarnish and discolor naturally. Once a desired patina is achieved, the oxidization process is arrested with a polyurethane veneer. Distinction in the aggregate field is thus a natural form of decomposition, curated for effect.
While conventional electroforming often relies on expensive resin molds and enduring masters, we were keen on deploying low
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HORNY TILE The horny tile prototype is concerned with producing a variable master. Rather than make multiple, static masters in order to produce a field of difference, the procedure as applied to an aperiodic tiling system, fragments the components into a series of horns. Each horn is 3d printed at a different height. The fragments can be reconfigured and racked together like a set of billiard balls within one of two binding wedges. This temporary arrangement is then vacuformed into a one-off styrene master. With a series of thirty plus three dimensionally printed horns, virtually infinite variability can be achieved in the field. Rack it, vacumform, do it again. The process ensure bargain rate master forms, making mass customization competitive.
Marc Krecic
TANKINI The Tankini draws its name from its association with bathing suit liner material rendered structural in an electroform tank. An experiment in the fabrication of structural fabric, the Tankini mock-up uses Lycra as substrate. The bathing suit liner is pulled taught over a removable acrylic scaffold and then metalized to structural rigidity. The fabric is tugged and dimpled as a fixed, sartorial index, a rigidified set of phase changing operations. But most importantly, the undulating complex curvature is produced without the aid of three axis tooling. Complex mechanization is bypassed in favor of a simple, repeating technique. The resultant tiles are self-structured, rigid, and virtually cut with a kitchen knife.
LACEY Lacey is an experiment with a synthetic paper fold up. Its ambition is to produce structural metallic polyhedron in service of surficial affects, partitions, canopies, ornamental veils. The strategy here relied on progressive rigidification. Yupo paper is patterned and laser cut into a simple continuous pattern. The cut out is electroformed flat, stiffening the material through copper deposit. The pattern is removed from the tank while it is still relatively malleable, folded into volumetric place, and dropped in the tank for further structural build up. In contrast to milling copper sheets, this process exploits only the copper necessary to render the unit operational. Waste is minimized as no cut material is lost.
PATINA Patina is seductive. And, arguably, it has been since Elizabethan times when an unchecked culture of conspicuous consumption lent tarnish and wear its socio-cultural ethos.
gains stature through time. In other words, in opposition to novelty, patina is legitimation. It authenticates and visualizes status as a consequence of time.
The Golden Age of English history, bred consumption and desire as a mode of social control, where in certain circles the aspiration toward the more and the new made the accumulation of wealth difficult, if not unfathomable. This is where the fashionable object dictated more than just matters of taste and status, but exerted a holding pattern through the fantastic reenactment of the pleasure of purchase.
Eventually patina as status is supplanted by fashion and its ever accelerated cycles. We see the shiny and the new triumph once again. But culture’s love affair with patina is never entirely lost. Ironically it emerges as a compulsory market aesthetic, as a scenographic counterfeit. Jeans are sandblasted to wabi sabi perfect, Home Depot Tuscan tiles are Tuscanized, and our flux of social media is filtered through warm shades of Instagram wistfulness.
In this scenario, consumption dictates status, identity, power. Where the new is associated with commonality, plain appreciation of gloss, patina carries a very different message. Patina makes a claim, through inanimate objects, that the decrepit has value, that it mysteriously
Where does all this leave Electroform(alism)? We are producing patina self-reflexively – it’s frugal, material and brand new. And we’re not afraid to mix it with chrome…
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TEAM Patrick Beaucé
Alex Belykh
Patrick Beaucé is a founding partner of Objectile, an architecture and design research laboratory based in Paris, France. His work, both constructed and speculative, is situated at the intersection of architectural design, digital fabrication and theory. Beaucé is a professor at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Valenciennes, where he has taught since 1997. He holds degrees from the École des BeauxArt de Rennes and the École des Beaux-Art de Nîmes in France.
Alex Belykh is the owner of Galvanique, a galvanoplasty fabrication facility in Johnston, Rhode Island. With a master of science degree from the Kharkiv Polytechnical Institute, he began experimenting with plating shortly after arriving in the United States from Ukraine. His work is situated at the intersection of engineering, fabrication and art. Alex finds endless inspiration from family and friends, and is an avid enthusiast for music and dance.
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Alex Belykh
John Guinn
Nathan Doud
John Guinn
Nathan Doud was born and raised here in Ann Arbor. After working in the Chicago theater industry as a freelance properties and scenic designer for six years, he spent a brief time as a deck builder and cabinet maker. He transitioned to architecture, earning his Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan in 2011, but still enjoys woodworking and designing for civic theater productions.
John Guinn is willfully naive, often at the expense of tact. He likes robots, especially if they’re on the fritz. He likes music, especially if it is fuzzy and droning, or dirty and made in a garage. Perhaps because of this, he has an appetite for the hastily assembled visceral experiences that arrest us and reshape our understanding of everyday spaces.
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Jean Louis Farges
Anya Sirota
Jean Louis Farges is a photographer, designer, project manager, and polemicist. He is interested in critical ethnomusicology, postcolonial landscapes and appropriations of the picturesque. Born in Paris, France, he has spent the last decade in the United States of America, and is now fully adjusted to the idea of nominal scale.
Anya Sirota is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Her work explores interim uses, cultural appropriation, ephemeral practices and digital networks. Sirota received her masters of architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and a B.A. in modern culture and media from Brown University.
THANK YOU Dean Monica Ponce de Leon Brittany Gacsy Mark Cunniff Mark Krecic James Chesnut Chris Reznich The FABLAB Electroform(alism) is made possible through the support of a Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning Research Through Making Grant.