The New York architect and designer Dr. Haresh Lalvani has been researching the forms of living things-particularly those of shape codes akin to our own DNA makeup for 30 years. This research and analysis he then translates into sculptural forms that seem always to be merging and growing not fixed or frozen in place. At his solo exhibition, Mass Customization of Emergent Designs, at Moss Gallery at Design Miami in 2011, he used an algorithm to create 1,000 design variations of a common fruit platter out of a total of 100,000,000,000 possible designs before the computer crashed.

Each platter was created with the same technology but preserved its inherent uniqueness. Lalvani’s claims this technology requires no economy of scale, as it costs no more for a factory to make all products different (mass-customization) than it costs to make them all the same (mass-production).

His Brooklyn-made sculptures have appeared in galleries and public forums around the city including his beautiful 9-foot-tall, folded-titanium volume covers that were displayed at the entrance into the architecture room at MoMA for several years. Now you can see his morphological forms in the beautiful Columbia county countryside of Ghent, New York at the Omi International Arts Center.

Lalvani has installed two sculptures X-POD and X-TOWER in the rolling landscape of the arts center. His X-TOWER for example is based on the towering form of California’s Sequoia trees and emerges from a single flat metal sheet and raises into a towering almost pine cone shape form that is at once beautiful, mysterious and powerful as a work of art.