Cones & Pillars series
for Frank Stella

Michael O'Rourke, 1985

Stella provided me with photographs and drawings of the compositions he was interested in. My NYIT colleagues Pat Hanrahan and Jacques Stroweis wrote software to calculate the Boolean intersections of the forms, while another colleague, Robert McDermott, wrote software to flatten out the faces of the polygonal forms.

For each sculpture I produced a set of plotter drawings of these flattened-out forms, each with the appropriate holes and cuts to allow it to intersect with the neighboring forms. Before giving them to Stella, I used the drawings to make small-scale paper models of each sculpture. From the drawings, Stella and his assistants fabricated the three-dimensional forms of the final sculptures in aluminum at scales of about 8' tall. These were painted and printed.

I described a similar process to the one used for Stella in an article published in Sculpture magazine in 1988.