The Strauch Hypercube lets there be light in the Grimes Engineering Center
Beauty is not foreign to mathematics. The natural order is far more interdisciplinary than academia’s hyper-compartmentalized disciplines might suggest. Take the Strauch Hypercube, hanging in the Grimes Engineering Center: elegant in its symmetry, this floating lightwork embodies what one might call “mathematical beauty.”
Suspended above the building’s atrium, the Strauch Hypercube roared to life last fall at a Dean’s Society event celebrating its installation. Alumni, faculty and distinguished guests gathered across three floors as the multicolored spectacle illuminated the interior space after dark. The building’s open-concept design turned the display into a beacon visible to the surrounding campus.
By turns a starry sky and a blinking marquee, no two vantage points were the same. Each cube pulsed in its own time, building toward a synergetic whole. Washes of blue melded into gold and back again, dissolving and reforming. It was as if pixelation became tactile, a real-life bitmap suspended in space.
Rooted in mathematics
“It’s a voxel structure, it’s suspended LED strands,” said Susan Narduli, the architect and artist behind the Strauch Hypercube. “I love this idea of this very, very pure, simple form within that volume. And to me, it also has a relationship to mathematics: a Cartesian grid, engineering principles, that kind of logical form.”
The Strauch Hypercube is a generative work. It is in conversation with itself, parsing the data encoded into its LED framework to create an infinite supply of visual patterns that never repeat.
“So basically the piece runs on algorithms,” Narduli said. “There’s a library of content, and it shifts from one to the next. It cycles through, but even when it comes back to the same algorithm, it’s always shifting.”
Unlike static artwork, the Hypercube performs more like a system. The piece was built using TouchDesigner as the primary platform, a “real-time, node-based programming environment” that merges visual coding, data integration and procedural generation. “It allows the artwork to behave like a living system, where logic, data and light interact dynamically to form evolving visual structures,” Narduli said.
These algorithms generate animations modeled after scientific concepts drawn from Berkeley Engineering’s academic disciplines. One sequence, inspired by fluid dynamics to represent environmental and energy engineering, appears as a gold-and-blue color pattern, an engaging way to transform abstract concepts into a visual experience.
As she progressed through her slide deck at the October ceremony, Narduli paused on an algorithm inspired by Physarum polycephalum. “Now this was something I’d never heard about,” she said. “This is apparently a slime mold growth.”
Just then, a shimmering wave of light flowed through the Strauch Hypercube animation on the Jarvis Auditorium screen, as the audience watched patterns move through the structure. “Look how beautiful it is, right?” she added.
The work, Narduli explained later, emerged directly from the interdisciplinary nature of engineering.
The Strauch Hypercube “absolutely came out of the fact that this was this forum of thought and all these different engineering disciplines coming together in one space,” she said. “That was the genesis for the piece.”
Filling an architectural void
When Narduli first met donor Roger Strauch — who with his brother, Hans, funded the installation in honor of their father, Karl — he described how he imagined a dynamic artwork filling the volume of the space. An engineer, Roger was looking for something resembling “a lava-like flow of light that would subtly move the building occupants to be at once inquisitive and thoughtful.”
That sparked the idea for the Hypercube’s small, reflective cubes that disperse from the center like exploding pixels.
It was a visual concept that nestled neatly into the Grimes Engineering Center’s open-concept atrium. Narduli, who was “taken by the simple, pure geometries of the building,” went to work on a structure that “would appear to float within the large, open volume.”
The floating effect is made possible, in part, by the architectural addition of the Buckling-Restrained Brace (BRB) — an earthquake-preventative feature developed at Berkeley — in conjunction with shape memory alloys (SMAs). This first-of-its-kind use of SMAs allows the Strauch Hypercube to remain unobstructed across the atrium’s vast interior.
“The Strauch Hypercube is an important piece of art that we don’t want the floor movement to lead to its damage. The damage happens from the floor acceleration,” said Khalid Mosalam, professor of civil engineering, during the event. “When the floor accelerates, it leads to forces going to what’s on top of this floor and leads to the toppling of something or breaking of it. So there was a reduction of the floor acceleration as well with the use of this innovation.”
Igniting innovation at UC Berkeley
“Ephemerality” is the word Narduli returns to when describing light as the central feature of the installation. That idea has a significant application to Grimes Engineering Center as a public space designed to foster the intellectual evolution of Berkeley Engineering students.
“What I was primarily thinking about was this building [was] a living organism, at least metaphorically and functionally,” Narduli said. “So I wanted the artwork to represent that, to be part of that organism.”
Within a year of opening, that organism has whirred to life as a hub for advising, career services and social events. You see it in late-night study sessions in Raw Thrills Lounge, peer-to-peer tutoring at Engineering Student Services and panel events in Jarvis Auditorium. It’s common to see the sleek, tech-advanced space chock-full of knowledge crammers.
Consider this a fulfillment of the Strauch family’s vision when they donated the Hypercube: this visual centerpiece reflects future engineers’ capacity to be, as Roger says, “courageous, creative and impactful.”
With that in mind, it’s fitting that attendees at the Illumination ceremony shouted “Fiat Lux!” as the Hypercube took on yet another new form.