I may be forgiven if I’ve got twisters on the mind this week. As a sometime resident of Asheville, NC, in Buncombe County, I’m just now re-adjusting myself to the seasonal dangers, which in the South are on quite a different timeframe from those in my native Colorado. This is to say that the bevy of tornado notices appearing in the TV warning bar as I tried to watch Justified on Wednesday threw me for a loop (pardon the pun). Luckily, we were spared the storm’s true wrath, but that hasn’t shaken the very real sense of danger. Today’s sunny skies thus form a humorous counterpoint to Haresh Lalvani’s Cyclone Slant Table, a curiously off-kilter piece made of single sheets of stainless steel woven into an arabesque mesh.

Cyclone Slant Table. Desigend by Haresh Lalvani for Milgo Design Store.

The Alluring Algorithms of the Cyclone Slant Table

The intriguing piece’s intricate interweavings remind me, in equal measure, of a twisted slinky and a priceless silver medallion worn by a Moorish Princess. Lalvani—who is, incidentally, a PhD in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania—is known for his “morphological structural innovations,” and looking at Cyclone one gets the sense that his imagination’s store is rife with many more antecedents besides. Cyclone also gives the impression of a typical mundane backyard chain link fence that’s been re-claimed, re-appropriated, and re-configured into this swirling tour de force. Equal parts leaning tower of Pisa and hundred year storm, the Cyclone Slant Table is a sight to behold.

About the Manufacturer: The Milgo Design Store is an anomaly among the world of high-end A&D. More of an experimental foray into the real-world applications of complex math than a product manufacturer, Milgo “presents items of utility, generated from deep algorithmic processes, by the world’s leading computational designers.” Milgo frequently collaborates with PhD and Architectural/Artistic wunderkind Haresh Lalvani, whose work with Morphic Coding—“a powerful and flexible form of coding using advanced higher dimensional mathematics with profound implications for a wide range of fields”—is paving the way for new shapes in design. His Cyclone Slant Table gives a tantalizing sneak peak at where this brave new science for a brave new world might take us.