Fine lines

This past Sunday, the droves were thicker than usual because right now, a lot is going on at the Princeton Art Museum. There are five exhibitions occurring simultaneously: Frank Gehry, Jasper Johns, Chinese Art from the Imperial Palaces, Body Memory and Felix Candela.

Felix who?

Felix Candela (1910-1997), the Spanish-born engineer, builder and structural artist who worked mostly in Mexico, creating architectural elaborations on the hyperbolic parabaloid geometric form.

The hyperbola parabolic what?

To those familiar with engineering, and to those who took civil and environmental engineering (CEE) professor David Billington '50's class, CEE 262: Structures and the Urban Environment, Felix Candela and thin-shell concrete are recognizable, if not understandable, terms. But to the average museumgoer and Princeton student, both Candela and his complex architectural forms are mind-boggling. And mesmerizing.

Past the heavily dramatic European paintings, toward the back of the museum, shines a vision of pristine whiteness: the Peter B. Lewis Gallery. Within that gallery is the Candela exhibit, the result of a collaborative effort between the museum and the CEE department. A statement of the exhibition's purpose, "to demystify and humanize the discipline of engineering," greets the visitors.

Billington and CEE professor Maria Garlock spearheaded the project, beginning in 2005. Garlock first met Billington in 2002, when she was a student at Lehigh, and he was lecturing there. He taught her then that buildings and bridges are art forms; six years later, they teach together on the tenets of successful engineering: efficiency, economics and elegance. "To be a structural artist, you have to be a master builder with aesthetic motivation," Billington explained. Candela was a master builder. Now, he is a role model and point of reference for aspiring engineers.

The exhibition of Candela's professional progression also showcases the hard work of the Princeton students involved in its production. In 2007, Billington and Garlock approached Powell Draper GS and Sarah Halsey GS to study Candela and travel to Mexico to observe the condition of his works. The same year, Billington and Garlock hand-picked three additional "superstar grad students" - Kathleen Kelly GS '08, Ashley Thrall GS and Edward Segal GS '08 - to report on Candela's Cosmic Rays Laboratory, Church of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal and Bacardi Rum Factory. Noah Burger '04 and Christy Holzer '07 also researched Candela's structures as undergraduates.

The research these students did comprises the bulk of the chapters within the exhibition's book, and the students are responsible for the encased structural models of Candela's most inspirational buildings. The juxtaposition of Candela's scribbled-in sketchbooks, displaying the doodles of an undetected genius, and the three-dimensional miniatures made by Princeton's brightest, foreshadows the future of innovation in engineering.

"I love Candela," Halsey said. "I think the exhibit is beautiful, and I already enjoy engineering. The question is, what do other people think of it?"