When formulaic design is a good thing

Two math professors recently commissioned PLANT Architect Inc. to create an entry-niche feature wall as part of a full renovation of their loft. The pattern to be CNC routered into cherry wood-veneered Baltic Birch plywood panels could be described in layperson’sterms as nested parabolas. For those truly in the mathematical know, here’s our clients’ description of the formula we’re translating into a vector graphic:

“A curve, such as the curve carved into the cherry wall, is a set of points in the plane of the wood. The set of points can be described by giving the distance r of each point to a fixed origin and the angle a of the point to a fixed axis. For this curve we took the relationship between the distance and angle to be r=a^2. To make it look less symmetric, we rotated the fixed axis away from the horizontal.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.