Photos by MATT GENTRY The Roanoke Times

Architecture student David Rariden adjusts his table support structure in the Surge Building at Virginia Tech. Eleven Tech students and two professors displayed their creations at the Milan Furniture Fair last month.

Tech senior student Catherine Worsham manipulates a 1/6 scale model of her powder-coated steel bench design "Zig."

BLACKSBURG -- Walking through the airport in Milan, Italy, last month, 11 box-toting Virginia Tech students and two professors drew the attention of customs agents.

Agents asked students to open one of the boxes, thinking it might be merchandise they planned to sell.

Out came a six-pointed piece of what appeared to be twisted wood. Tech architecture student David Rariden made it for his industrial furniture class, taught by professors Robert Dunay and Joe Wheeler.

"It's beautiful," said the agent, a woman who could speak a little English. "What is it?"

It's a table -- at least would be if a piece of glass were set atop three of the points where the wood changes directions. The other three serve as legs. But without the glass it looks like an abstract sculpture.

Rariden's table wasn't even the funkiest piece the group displayed at the Milan Furniture Fair, a major international design event. That distinction might go to Jonathan Grinham's honeycomb-style chair made of 162 metal pieces formed into loops and attached by 900 rivets. Or maybe it's Catherine Worsham's bright red bench that resembles a bicycle rack or perhaps a series of feet or the jaws of a giant mechanical beast.

But the creations aren't handcrafted works bent and sculpted by artists. There's a definite method to this madness. It's called computer numerical controlled production. The technology has been around for about a decade, Dunay said. But it is just evolving to the point at which universities can take advantage of it to test new concepts of function and form and push the limits of materials.

Students in the class create computer designs of their work and through algorithms and mathematical equations, computer programs decide the length and shape and form different materials need to be. The file is then sent to a computer-controlled wood router, laser cutter or plasma cutter to create the pieces that make the finished product. It's a relatively hands-off process relying more on math and design knowledge than metal- or wood-shop skills.

Tech's School of Architecture + Design received new equipment to put the technology to work last year. B&M Sheet Metal of Roanoke also supplied materials and let the students use its equipment.

The students were among those from 22 schools invited to the Milan fair and one of only two from the United States. They were joined by professionals from more than 2,000 companies. The Tech students left the six-day fair with contacts from several professionals who were intrigued with their work and an invitation to attend another design fair in Cologne, Germany, in January.

Furniture is not the endgame for Dunay and Wheeler's class. It is, however, a pretty cool middle game.

"We'd like to really push it further in terms of maybe finding different kinds of elements or different conditions that one might use in normal day-to-day life," Dunay said.

While Grinham's chair displays what appears to be an artsy randomness, each of the 162 strips of metal was cut to a specific shape, length and width to create the chair. The computer also mapped out where the rivet holes would go. Each piece was numbered so Grinham could look at the model and know where to attach the pieces. There's no way it could be made without the help of a computer, Wheeler said. It's just too complicated.

"The alignment of the rivets allows it to become this newly organic thing from this digital process," Grinham said. "The rivets are telling this sheet metal which way to bend."

Wheeler and Dunay have been working on the concept of industrialized furniture with students for about 2¹₂ years. Some students have taken the class, which consists of graduate and undergraduate students, multiple times.

"New things happen. It's not like you're doing the same thing over and over again," said Marc Holbrook, a fourth-year architecture student who plans to take the class a fourth time this fall. "It's the kind of class where you can do something different every semester."

The evolution of the work can be seen very clearly in some pieces, such as a series of stools and chairs that show surprising lightness or stackability or strength. CNC-produced furniture has advantages when it comes to mass production, precision and efficiency. Most of the furniture is composed of once-flat pieces of metal that have been cut and shaped with little or no waste. The technology has been used for years in the automotive and aerospace industries.

While many of the projects went through multiple iterations to correct design flaws or for aesthetic improvements, Worsham's red "bench" changed functions during the process. A slinkylike steel structure with a kind of zig-zag design, there's not a lot of actual material per foot, which makes it very light. But the finished product had a tendency to bend on each end and wasn't quite stable enough to be used as a table.

That's when another student suggested she make it a bench. The switch to urban furniture worked perfectly. If it's bolted to the ground, stabilization is not an issue. It's slinkylike qualities make it easy to bend to the contours of a sidewalk or a park. And it's just uncomfortable enough to serve as a place to take a load off without encouraging people to sleep on it.

It's that potential for new uses and "I don't know what it is, but I like it" thought process that excites Dunay.

"We might try to push this to where we're trying to find functions," he said. "Instead of saying, 'We have a chair, now we have to figure out how to make one.' We have a material, we have a production process that can do 'this.' Can it work, in some context?"