The Sculpture World Borrows a Page from the Built World Playbook

What happens when the discipline applied by construction project managers and real estate developers finds its way into collaboration with sculptors and other artists?  According to Frank Berry, an engineer who has worked with many artists over the years, many good things can happen!  Our Marketing Director, Mike Quill, sat down with Frank to explore this topic and get Frank’s take on the techniques that have been well-established in “the built world” and how they can be applied to advantage in the realm of the art. 

MQ: Tell me a little about your professional background.

FB: What I do is mechatronics, where many things are powered and there are specific structural and other requirements at play.  I design and build power sources for specific things such as buildings, windmills, signs and sculptures.  My degree is in mechanical engineering.

MQ: What is your position?

FB: I contract with the AFX Division of Sign Effectz, Inc.  I’m also the owner of a company called Artifacts.  I’m the engineer that collaborates on things that are more complicated than street signage (for example: cantilevered sun shades and other AFX projects). Since we're “defying gravity” in the simple example of a sunshade, we have to “harness some of the existing structure” to ensure that the building component meets the expectations of durability, fit, finish and aesthetic expectations. This situation becomes --more than a little-- like art!

MQ: What does AFX's methodology bring to the decision-making process used by artists?

FB: The key thing is time-phased control (ie., revision control) of the project details from start to finish, front to back..  This practice supports cost control, timely material procurement and good communication among the project’s many stakeholders. 

The hard part of any “built world” project is teasing out the requirements; doing fulfillment on them and elaborating them in a clear, concise, organized and “standard” manner. In the planning business, we call this “U+A”; obtaining every stakeholder's understanding and agreement that the requirements of the project are real, important, and able to be fulfilled within schedule, and budget.

 “Requirements U+A” is a sub-planning task that requires good communication and publication.   In “the built world” there is an ever-broadening cast of characters to be included in the “U+A” process.  For example, there are construction managers that hope to have oversight on myriad project details. There are planners who hope to fold many of the “as built” aspects of the project into a BIM, “Building Info Management System”; and need to know the mapping between defined requirements and features to “get the information right”! It does no one any good to record “we put a warning stripe on the hallway” without defining the requirement – code, owner preference, corporate protocol , whatever – that drove the solution. 

MQ: What do you see in terms of trends in this area of collaboration between artists and “the built world”?

FB: The key to process control is communication.  It raises the bar.  The trend, if there is one, is that there is an excruciating amount of planning going on, in ever-rising detail; and that sculpture, in order to collaborate in the world of architecture, has to be defined by a rigorous process.  I’m working on a white paper that will look at various “use cases” that support this notion – the use of good, standard project and process communication to enhance and enable sculpture “in the built world”.

There is a chicken and egg to this notion of “rigor”.  If it turned out that it was well understood that everyone – from artists building wearable sculpture, like “jewelers” to artists who manipulate environmental features – and I'm specifically thinking of the brand new Los Angeles County Museum installation, where the artist placed a huge rock over a sort of canal that humans can navigate through -- published good plans and executed faithfully to those plans, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. 

One key to project and process communication is the successive publication of responses to change: i.e. revision control.  I’ve rarely seen it used in the world of art.  In this world of art, sculptors are responsible for the visual aesthetic.  Artists often feel they can change aesthetics until they “have the look right”.  But you can’t build “expected” things without revision control – as many of the changes might influence other details of schedule, budget, requirements, understanding, agreement, and execution!

MQ: Why is this topic important at this time?

FB: There are rules, regulations, plans and costs. Process control requirements have always been there, even going back centuries, to geniuses like Filippo Brunelleschi (born in 1377, one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance). We just haven’t always acknowledged them in the world of sculpture.  If sculptors and architects are going to “build” together, artists are going to have to salute the planning process: understand it and embrace it.

Folks from the building community may impose the cost of practices like phased, controlled documentation upon an artist as part of the rigors of doing the job.  Because at the end of the day, a sculptural object is a sculptural object – whether it’s a city plaza or a wedding ring!  The thing that makes it architecture is having a well-defined process surrounding and supporting the definition, project basis, and execution -- of the sculptural object.   

MQ: Do you feel like you have positively affected Milwaukee’s art scene? How so?

FB: AFX has a clear mission: we try to maintain the visual aesthetic in the face of overwhelming constraints imposed by rules, regulations, plans, and costs.  It takes a little more than building an object and then hoping!

AFX strives to be one of a few firms that are ART enablers in a process-specific world.  We don't get involved where there is an artistic piece going into someone’s private residence.    If your sculptural entity has to be integrated into another structural setting, we can certainly have a positive effect on the outcome of a project.  We can bring value where you have the notion of some sculptural, artistic concept created in a fabrication facility – using specific well understood processes, materials, methods, plans and project communication.

MQ: What are you doing that other, similar companies are not?

FB: It’s more like what we aren’t doing and others are.  The reality is that the creative aspect of this business is embodied in an approach to the problem of maintaining the visual aesthetic while still meeting the built world constraints and not surrendering the visual aesthetic in order to meet them.  What other companies may be doing; and what I’ve heard from artists, is that they compromise, or even “surrender” the visual aesthetic in order to meet the constraints. That is what artists do not want. 

About AFX, Inc.: AFX provides artists, architects and design professionals with the engineering, materials, and methods needed to fabricate, install and warrant “creative architectural objects”, like kinetic sculpture, active facades and ornamental building components.