At first glance, the work of Marc Fornes, founder of Brooklyn-based Marc Fornes/TheVeryMany, seems more like sculpture than architecture. His geometrically complex pieces, developed through computational design and fabrication, include museum installations, public art, and pop-up environments. They appear to take their cues from natural forms including those of crustaceans, plants, and wild animals. But Fornes, who is a native of France but moved to New York in 2006 to work for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, insists that his approach is that of an architect rather than a sculptor. TheVeryMany's formal language, he says, is the product of exploiting curvature to make efficient structures. “With each project, we are trying to produce space and structure,” he explains.
Fornes's objects are usually comprised of thousands of flat elements—hence the name TheVeryMany. These are cut with a computer numerical control (CNC) machine from sheets of aluminum and are held together with rivets to form self-supporting skins. And, although they do not provide shelter in the conventional sense, the finished works define space and are often large enough to occupy. One example is Double Agent White, which Fornes designed and built in 2012 while an artist-in-residence at the Atelier Calder in Sach', France. Made of weblike aluminum surfaces describing nine intersecting spheres, it is now at the FRAC Centre in Orl'ans (record, October 2013, page 80), where visitors can walk under the roughly 11-foot-tall canopy, 20 feet in diameter, and circulate around its supporting “trunks.”
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