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Associated Fabrication: Heavy metal/light touch

By David Sokol

The border of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods is an industrial-zone ballet. Behind garage-door prosceniums, pallet drivers turn pirouettes in loaded vehicles. A welder performs a pas de deux with a giant unfinished steel luminaire.

Images courtesy Associated Fabrication

The four partners of Associated Fabrication operate a design firm under the name 4-pli, and mobilize Associated's services within different projects.

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For the brains behind the brawn, consider the choreographers of Associated Fabrication. Inside a derelict factory that had once been used for dying textiles and stamping steel, Associated’s four partners control the ronde de jambe–like movements of their Thermwood CS45-510 three-axis CNC mill, which produces architectural elements for a wide range of designers—including themselves, working under the moniker 4pli. Bursts from the drain valve on the mill’s air compressor provide orchestral accompaniment.

William Mowat, Amy Stringer, Jeffrey Taras, and Ken Tracy, who range in age from 30 to 35, all earned master’s degrees from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture in May 2005. They’re not the only recent graduates to go into the business of making: Associated shares space with Caliper Studio, two of whose partners also went to school there.

Tracy thinks this is a counterpoint to his alma mater’s promotion of digital design. “It was tiring just being in Maya and being able to make anything curvy. We wanted to make things physical.” The members started working through the impulse at Columbia, which had installed a high-tech fabrication workshop in 2004. Today, Associated fields queries from school ties working at firms like Asymptote and Michael Maltzan Architecture.

The quartet hadn’t originally set out to start a fabrication business. In May 2005, Taras had also snagged a job to design the office interior for Brainpop, a Web-based educational service, when he first assembled the team. A miniscule budget combined with their interest in hands-on materialization compelled the friends to design case furniture they could assemble themselves. “We made things with technology we trusted, using stacking techniques,” Taras recalls. They outsourced the CNC milling, and sweated to put together 24 plywood-and-aluminum desks, a conference table, and other pieces.

The experience opened their eyes to the potential market for a New York City–based operation that could strongly sympathize with an architect’s vision, and which would support 4pli until it took off. Now, Taras says, “We’ve been able to incorporate lessons that someone else paid for,” and points to a curved maple-veneer wall at the 19,000-square-foot New Dance Group studio in Manhattan, fabricated for Spivak Architects, as an important training in lamination. “We are willing to try something new and different,” Mowat says of Associated’s mission. That enthusiasm for learning informs 4pli’s own growth and has helped the partners dance into the hearts of clients like SOM, who are rewarding their fabrication knowledge with ever bigger, more challenging commissions.

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