Electroform(alism)

ELECTROFORM(ALISM)
MASTERS, SUBSTRATES AND THE RULES OF ATTRACTION
TAUBMAN COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE + URBAN PLANNING
RESEARCH THROUGH MAKING 2013

CONTENTS
Introduction 5
What’s the Appeal 7
Backstory 18
Technique 20
The Lab 25
Blobby Tile 37
Horny Tile 45
Tankini 47
Lacey 53
Patina 57
Team 59
Thank you 64
Electroform(alism) is a collaborative research project made possible through a Taubman
College of Architecture and Urban Planning Research Through Making Grant.
Anya Sirota, Jean Louis Farges, Patrick Beaucé, Alex Belykh, Nathan Doud, John Guinn
featured graphicist, Brittany Gacsy

INTRODUCTION
Electroform(alism) is a an ongoing collaborative
experiment. It explores hybrid ways of
making, coupling nineteenth century plating
techniques with contemporary fabrication.
Think Victorians meet digital design.
Technically, aesthetically, materially and
economically, the possibilities are exciting,
luxurious, and dare we say, liberating.
To re-imagine electroplating as an intrepid,
present-day process we would need to become
familiar with traditional galvanoplasty, or
the techniques involved in the production
and replication of metallic objects on a
master form. Then, we would proceed to
test new composites and micro-structures
using permanent, expendable, and embedded
substrates.
The wager for us was double. Up front
we sought to generate novel metallurgical
environments, structural fabrics, articulated
skins - the stuff design dreams are made of.
But perhaps more importantly, we wanted to
imagine a new mode of small scale fabrication,
one that could be adaptive, nomadic, modest,
yet generative. A method that could be shared,
rigged, but not pinched, repeated but not mass
produced.
The project brought together an inimitable
group of makers, designers, students, and
fabricators who collectively built a mobile lab
and tested a series of speculative processes.
These are the notes on a work in progress.
We hope you enjoy.
5

WHAT’S THE APPEAL?
Electroforming is so appealing. And there are
many reasons why. This is our laundry list. It
is by no means complete. But it aims to explain
our attraction to the method fabrication - its
intrepid possibilities and generative potentials
- beyond the brazen draw of bling. Though,
like ravens, we do like shiny things.
Reason one: SIZE DOESN’T MATTER. The
gamut of scales at which electroplating can
be deployed makes working with virtually any
size unit possible. In the nineteenth century
plated cutlery was all the rage. During World
War II, Americans plated entire submarines
in Detroit’s automotive manufacturing
facilities, producing virtually infallible metal
monocoques. And everything in between can
be plated as well. The scale of the project
depends on the size of the tank and the
amount of electrolyte material it can hold. In
our case, we started with the approximate tank
the size of a garbage can. Actually, we started
with a garbage can. And this allowed us to
experiment with artifacts about a foot squared.
Reason two: IT’S MOLECULAR!
Electroplating is a chemical process which
works at the molecular level. Metal particles
move from the ingot and deposit on a master
or substrate – and this happens gradually –
which is just super. It allows for the buildup
of material to a precise thickness over time.
Meaning plated components can be designed
and engineered to a specified tensile strength
with virtually zero waste. It also means that
recyclability is embedded in the very logic of
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the process. The insufficiently beautiful, the
structurally flawed and the not so endearingly
fugly can be tossed back in the tank and put
back to work as source material for a new
deposit.
Reason three: WE LOVE SHORT RUN
PRODUCTION. Electroforming favors short
run production over the artisanal and mass
manufactured.
Artisanal craft emphasizes the auratic value of
the one-off. This can be very nice. Beautiful,
really. But value is produced in the private
exchange between a patron and a craftsperson,
which is terrific as a single instance of preindustrial
exchange. As a strategy, however,
we’re interested in delivering a generative
method for economic resilience; a way of
making that is greater in scope and enterprise.
On the other spectrum, mass production is
ubiquitous and prosaic. As a rule of thumb,
it invariably culminates in outsourcing.
Accepting that the misnamed post-industrial
phase is simply a global market shift toward
more exuberant material extraction, it’s safe
to say that manufacturing competition is fierce
out there. And regions uninhibited by labor
laws and other civic constraints possess a
preemptive economic advantage when it comes
in making lots of things in big quantities.
So while electroforming can certainly be used
when making a single artifact or a large mass
produced run, it is smaller scale industrial
fabrication that’s privileged by the method.
8

SIZE DOESN’T MATTER

IT’S MOLECULAR!

Where casting and sheet metal forming
require a minimum run to compensate for the
production of an expensive mold or master
cast, electroforming can be deliberately frugal
and foxy.
Reason #4: NOMADIC FABRICATION.
Electroplating facilities can be compact and
mobile, as small and itinerant as the sum of
their component parts. Depending on the
desired output, the facility can be transported
with relative ease. All you need is a source of
current, the rectifier, a plastic garbage can and
you’re ready to plate. Collapsing the distance
between the site of fabrication and installation
allows for a certain level of demonstrative
pageantry. Making (as) spectacle. We imagine
deploying the nomadic fabrication facility in
multiple scenarios: within industrial sites,
adjacent to facades under construction, at the
Astana International Biennale’s American
pavilion.
Reason #5: SLOW COOKING MAKES
THINGS DELICIOUS. We like leisure. And
we’re interested in reducing the compulsion
of labor, whether real, symbolic or imaginary.
Where hyper-articulated aggregation is
dependent upon low cost sweet equity or
free labor, electroforming can be deployed
toward the production of the snap in – simple
interlocking units that connect with the
unfussiness of tiles. And so the advantage
of working with plating as a fabrication
technique recalls the logic of a crock pot.
Choose the right ingredients, the right
proportion, and let the process go.
12

WE HEART SHORT RUN PRODUCTION

NOMADIC FABRICATION FOR ALL

BACKSTORY
The ascendancy of electroforming as a
mode of metal fabrication was irrepressible.
It fulfilled the Victorian era’s insatiable
enthusiasm for industrial ingenuity, superficial
beautification and economical manufacture.
By the 1860’s the process, well-suited to
Beaux- Arts sensibilities, was deployed
in the production of saturated, figurative
ornamentation and monumental sculpture.
Over the span of close to a century, cathedrals,
operas and institutional buildings in Europe
and the United States were populated with
articulated bronze effigies to preeminent
national personalities and other worthwhile
fictions. On the market, the method made
refined but attainable objects of consumer
desire available in an array of possible
simulacra: romantic, orientalist, or decorative.
And, in perhaps the most ubiquitous
operation, the printing and engraving trades
customized the technique in the production
of electrotyped copper plates, which replaced
wood block as the standard method in the
production of letter forms.
In the twentieth century electroforming
was co-opted by the military for industrial
fabrication of highly accurate and stable
parts for high density “baby” submarines,
antenna masts, molds for explosives, radar
and electronic components, and so on, with
much of the manufacturing taking place in
Detroit, Michigan. Eventually, however, with
the rise of Modernist visual austerity, postwar
distrust for mimetic public cenotaphs,
advancements in offset printing, and shifts
in the global labor market, electroforming
became relegated to the realm of a small
group of experts and craft specialists working
with architectural conservation, heritage
curation, exquisite art objects and jewelry
design.
An aside: Now as with all significant industrial
inventions, Electroform’s origin story is
polemical, with several inventors claiming title
to the method. Moritz von Jacobi , a Prussian
scientist in Saint Petersburg, Russia, is generally
credited with the discovery of electroforming in
1838. With the financial assistance and limitless
enthusiasm of Czar Nicholas, he published an
account of his experimentation in a text titled
‘Die Galvanoplastik’. The method fed well into
Russia’s taste for baroque ornamentation. Within
half a century, aided by the advent of the electric
generator, guilds and labor unions had formed
around the practice.
18

TECHNIQUE
Electroforming is a deceptively simple process.
It’s produced through the deployment of a
series of variable and contingent components
- matrix material, chemical bath, and substrate
– impacted by time and scale.
Conventionally, the practice begins with
a mold, or master, whose surface is made
conducting with a thin coat of graphite
powder or paint. A wire is attached to the
conducting surface and the mold is suspended
in an electrolyte solution. Electro-deposition
of the material - typically alloy foil, silver,
nickel, or copper - onto the mold is activated
using electrical currents. When the mold is
coated to the desired thickness, the object is
removed from the bath and divorced, partially
or totally, from the original mold.
The outward straightforwardness of the
process disguises the extraordinary range
of metallurgical effects that can be achieved
through the adjustment of the matrix mix,
plating bath composition, and conditions of
the depositor, allowing for the production
of components that cannot be realized via
sheet metal fabrication techniques. The
operation allows for unmatched dimensional
accuracy, thin material sections, complex
curvatures, shapes and refined detailing with
no limit to the size of the object that can be
electroformed.
Most exciting, however, is that an electrodeposit
can be applied to virtually any solid
material: aluminum, zinc, nickel, stainless
steel, invar, Kovar, glass, plastic, wood, foam,
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or synthetic fiber. The process can be deployed
progressively, building up fine layers of
multiple metal matrices in order to achieve the
desired finish, tensile strength and complex
form.
Electroforming differs greatly from
metalworking techniques such as punching
and milling in that it produces virtually no
waste other than the substrate material which,
if strategically considered, remains at the
core of the finished product and enhances the
structural performance of the composite.
The continued existence of the substrate,
embedded within the final metalized object,
offers a particularly fertile area for study
within the broader scope of the project.
As in reinforced concrete, these composite
constructions can combine the positive
performance characteristics of both materials.
Electroformed structural foams could combine
visual mass and scale with very minimal
weight; substrate fabrics like Kevlar could
yield composites with incredible tensile
strength at nominal thicknesses.
Given electroplating technical potentials, our
roughly broke down into three categories for
testing:
(1)NEW SUBSTRATES
The creation of new substrates will be
evaluated according to their aesthetic,
physical, and economic qualities.
Permanent, expendable and embedded
masters will be assessed according to
the accuracy they yield in the electrodeposition
process as well as the
performance characteristics they offer to
the resultant material composite.
Engaging contemporary digital design and
fabrication techniques, the research will
test materials and operations involving
pleating, surface mesh, and aggregate
modeling. CNC milled foam and CNC
21

cut fabrics will serve as experimental
substrates, among other materials.
The material from which substrates can
be generated is almost limitless, and
includes metals, plastics, rubber, fabric,
leather, sealed wood and plaster. The only
restrictions imposed on the suitability
of substrates are that they are able to
withstand corrosion from mild acids and
are non-absorptive when immersed in
solutions.
(2)METHODS OF MANIPULATION
Critical to the project is the idea that
experimentation, interruption and
manipulation of the electroform process
can lead to unexpected methods of
making. The intention is to test new
substrates by considering the time, mass,
conductivity and general dimensional
characteristics of the material, to test
weaving, pleating, lace, modeling and
folding as modes of formal manipulation,
to explore the effects produced through
multiple metal depositions, including
layering and admixing, and to experiment
with modes of progressive intervention,
such as draping, cutting, and drilling.
Finally the substrates and electroform
prototypes will be tested to determine
their tensile and compressive strengths.
(3)COMPOSITES AND MICRO-
STRUCTURES
The spatial application of the research
will be evaluated based on the geometric
constraints and the physical parameters of
the test material produced. Deploying the
composite generated, we intend to explore
the architectural and industrial design
potential through a series of applications.
Building skins, interior surfaces, partitions,
and enclosures will be considered as
potential components for micro-structures,
foregrounding craft and deliberate design
intent in the production of physical texture,
material efficiency, and optical effect.
22

Marc Cunnif, JC Gorham, RI

THE LAB
To begin testing, we would need a laboratory.
So we built one: an adjustable, mobile copper
plating unit that could be broken down into
an 8’x8’ base module, with 4’x8’ additional
expansion modules. We were thinking ahead.
Maybe our enterprise would grow.
The chamber needed an exhaust fan in the
ceiling, a floor of 60-mil EPDM liner (to
catch any electrolyte spills). The unit, placed
on casters, could be relocated easily within
a facility. It could also be broken down and
transported to an alternate fabrication site,
exploring the idea of a nomadic fabrication
unit.
bus bars, anodes, light gauge copper wire,
electro-conductive paint, containers, copper
electroforming solution, rinsing bath, safety
goggles, aprons, shelves with base matrices,
electroclean solution, replenishing brightener,
acid dip solution, red lacquer, small pump, or
other solution agitation devices.
We purchased the components second
hand in Rhode Island, where the hard hit
jewelry industry has flooded the market
with industrial remnants and tools. Then
we trucked the parts back to Ann Arbor,
Michigan, and set up the fabrication facility in
a barn on Warren Road.
Inside: a lined tank, a 10 amp rectifier,
clamps and lead set heavy gauge wire for
The testing was tricky. It was easy to over
cook by cranking the voltage too high.
25

Get the levels in the solution all wrong
and the copper doesn’t take. Estimate flow
improperly and one side of end of the
substrate might grow a sprout, or worse,
a cauliflower. Make the master too deep,
or textured and the process won’t take...
Experiments with materials that failed as
substrates. Each test took time and patience.
For the amateur, the process is finicky. And it
is difficult to isolate exactly which components
are all wrong or need to be just slightly
adjusted.
generative. The productive tests have names:
Blobby Tile, Horney Tile, Tankini, Lacey.
In the winter we added insulation and a small
electrical heater. A family of racoons settled
on top.
But the lab allowed us for to test a tremendous
matrix of possible substrates in order
to explore new material and fabrication
possibilities. Of the myriad of experiments
that we initiated four emerged as particularly
26

BLOBBY TILE
In developing the blobby tile series we
were interested in maximizing variation
while relying on a single interlocking unit.
Each simple component is identical in plan.
The units are designed in clusters of three
discrete topographies in order to suggest
the possibility of a heterogeneous field.
Borrowing from the logic of arabesque
geometric patterning systems, we developed a
catalogue of tile species in 90 plus adaptations
– each concerned with the production and
perception of heightened discrepancy, but
bound by the logics of economic plausibility
and frugality.
cost replication techniques. We turned to
vacuformed styrene plates produced from cnc
milled medium density fiber board in order to
diffuse the cost of the original mill-work over
the span of the production run.
Variation in the blobby tile color palette is
achieved by allowing copper to tarnish and
discolor naturally. Once a desired patina is
achieved, the oxidization process is arrested
with a polyurethane veneer. Distinction in
the aggregate field is thus a natural form of
decomposition, curated for effect.
While conventional electroforming often
relies on expensive resin molds and enduring
masters, we were keen on deploying low
37

HORNY TILE
The horny tile prototype is concerned with
producing a variable master. Rather than make
multiple, static masters in order to produce a
field of difference, the procedure as applied to
an aperiodic tiling system, fragments the components
into a series of horns. Each horn is
3d printed at a different height. The fragments
can be reconfigured and racked together like a
set of billiard balls within one of two binding
wedges. This temporary arrangement is then
vacuformed into a one-off styrene master.
With a series of thirty plus three dimensionally
printed horns, virtually infinite variability
can be achieved in the field. Rack it, vacumform,
do it again. The process ensure bargain
rate master forms, making mass customization
competitive.

Marc Krecic

TANKINI
The Tankini draws its name from its
association with bathing suit liner material
rendered structural in an electroform tank.
An experiment in the fabrication of structural
fabric, the Tankini mock-up uses Lycra as
substrate. The bathing suit liner is pulled
taught over a removable acrylic scaffold
and then metalized to structural rigidity.
The fabric is tugged and dimpled as a fixed,
sartorial index, a rigidified set of phase
changing operations. But most importantly,
the undulating complex curvature is produced
without the aid of three axis tooling. Complex
mechanization is bypassed in favor of a simple,
repeating technique. The resultant tiles are
self-structured, rigid, and virtually cut with a
kitchen knife.

LACEY
Lacey is an experiment with a synthetic paper
fold up. Its ambition is to produce structural
metallic polyhedron in service of surficial
affects, partitions, canopies, ornamental veils.
The strategy here relied on progressive
rigidification. Yupo paper is patterned and
laser cut into a simple continuous pattern.
The cut out is electroformed flat, stiffening
the material through copper deposit. The
pattern is removed from the tank while
it is still relatively malleable, folded into
volumetric place, and dropped in the tank
for further structural build up. In contrast to
milling copper sheets, this process exploits
only the copper necessary to render the unit
operational. Waste is minimized as no cut
material is lost.

PATINA
Patina is seductive. And, arguably, it has been
since Elizabethan times when an unchecked
culture of conspicuous consumption lent tarnish
and wear its socio-cultural ethos.
gains stature through time. In other words, in
opposition to novelty, patina is legitimation. It
authenticates and visualizes status as a consequence
of time.
The Golden Age of English history, bred
consumption and desire as a mode of social
control, where in certain circles the aspiration
toward the more and the new made the accumulation
of wealth difficult, if not unfathomable.
This is where the fashionable object
dictated more than just matters of taste and
status, but exerted a holding pattern through
the fantastic reenactment of the pleasure of
purchase.
In this scenario, consumption dictates status,
identity, power. Where the new is associated
with commonality, plain appreciation of gloss,
patina carries a very different message. Patina
makes a claim, through inanimate objects, that
the decrepit has value, that it mysteriously
Eventually patina as status is supplanted by
fashion and its ever accelerated cycles. We see
the shiny and the new triumph once again.
But culture’s love affair with patina is never
entirely lost. Ironically it emerges as a compulsory
market aesthetic, as a scenographic
counterfeit. Jeans are sandblasted to wabi sabi
perfect, Home Depot Tuscan tiles are Tuscanized,
and our flux of social media is filtered
through warm shades of Instagram wistfulness.
Where does all this leave Electroform(alism)?
We are producing patina self-reflexively – it’s
frugal, material and brand new. And we’re not
afraid to mix it with chrome…
57

TEAM
Patrick Beaucé
Patrick Beaucé is a founding partner of
Objectile, an architecture and design research
laboratory based in Paris, France. His work,
both constructed and speculative, is situated at
the intersection of architectural design, digital
fabrication and theory. Beaucé is a professor
at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design de
Valenciennes, where he has taught since 1997.
He holds degrees from the École des Beaux-
Art de Rennes and the École des Beaux-Art de
Nîmes in France.
Alex Belykh
Alex Belykh is the owner of Galvanique, a
galvanoplasty fabrication facility in Johnston,
Rhode Island. With a master of science
degree from the Kharkiv Polytechnical
Institute, he began experimenting with plating
shortly after arriving in the United States
from Ukraine. His work is situated at the
intersection of engineering, fabrication and
art. Alex finds endless inspiration from family
and friends, and is an avid enthusiast for music
and dance.
59

Alex Belykh

John Guinn

Nathan Doud
Nathan Doud was born and raised here in
Ann Arbor. After working in the Chicago
theater industry as a freelance properties and
scenic designer for six years, he spent a brief
time as a deck builder and cabinet maker.
He transitioned to architecture, earning his
Master of Architecture from the University
of Michigan in 2011, but still enjoys
woodworking and designing for civic theater
productions.
John Guinn
John Guinn is willfully naive, often at the
expense of tact. He likes robots, especially if
they’re on the fritz. He likes music, especially
if it is fuzzy and droning, or dirty and made
in a garage. Perhaps because of this, he has
an appetite for the hastily assembled visceral
experiences that arrest us and reshape our
understanding of everyday spaces.
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Jean Louis Farges
Jean Louis Farges is a photographer, designer,
project manager, and polemicist. He is
interested in critical ethnomusicology, postcolonial
landscapes and appropriations of
the picturesque. Born in Paris, France, he has
spent the last decade in the United States of
America, and is now fully adjusted to the idea
of nominal scale.
Anya Sirota
Anya Sirota is an Assistant Professor at the
University of Michigan’s Taubman College of
Architecture and Urban Planning. Her work
explores interim uses, cultural appropriation,
ephemeral practices and digital networks.
Sirota received her masters of architecture
from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design,
and a B.A. in modern culture and media from
Brown University.

THANK YOU
Dean Monica Ponce de Leon
Brittany Gacsy
Mark Cunniff
Mark Krecic
James Chesnut
Chris Reznich
The FABLAB
Electroform(alism) is made possible through the support of a Taubman College of Architecture
and Urban Planning Research Through Making Grant.