With assembled guests and faculty shouting “Fiat Lux,” the official motto of the University of California, Berkeley, the Strauch Hypercube illuminated the atrium of the new Grimes Engineering Center for the first time during a special ceremony on October 25, 2025. The light installation was donated by Roger and Hans Strauch, co-Trustees of The Mosse Foundation, in honor of their father, Harvard professor Karl Strauch, a graduate of UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. The Strauch brothers and sculptor Susan Narduli were on hand for the inauguration of the Strauch Hypercube, which dazzled guests with a brilliant light show, the building otherwise dimmed to further highlight the piece’s dynamic luminescence.

The genesis of the Strauch Hypercube began when the College of Engineering chose to renovate the Bechtel Engineering Center, building upward to add two new floors and an additional 35,500 square feet of space for students. Renamed the Grimes Engineering Center, the overhaul revitalized the space. Interim dean Mark Asta praised the new center for providing “essential academic resources, mentorship programs, wellness initiatives, and community-building activities that nurture both personal and professional development.” Hans, an architect in Boston, declared, “What a remarkable building this is… buzzing with intellectual activity,” and he was struck by “the amount of effort and energy and talent that goes into creating such a beautiful space.”

To enhance this beauty further, Roger and Hans decided to donate an art piece for the new building via The Mosse Foundation, their family charity. The Mosse Foundation honors the philanthropic legacy of the Mosse family through support of the arts, education, and a broad program of innovative charitable works, and both brothers have been benefactors of UC Berkeley for many years. They have each been named “Builders of Berkeley,” and with this new donation they sought to commemorate the legacy of their father. As Roger explained at the inauguration, “Karl Strauch loved his country, his family, his work, and inspired his sons to do the same.”

Karl Strauch was a German refugee who escaped to Paris in the 1930s and then to America when the Nazis invaded France. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1944 before joining the Navy, and then returned for his PhD after he was discharged from his service. Karl taught at Harvard for the next 40 years, becoming chair of the University’s Physics Department in 1978. His research explored the fundamental building blocks of the universe, and his work with particle accelerators provided some of the first concrete evidence for the existence of quarks. Karl also chaired the committee that merged Harvard and Radcliffe College, leading to women attending Harvard for the first time.

In the early planning stages, Roger and Hans knew they wanted an art piece “that would be kinetic and timeless,” but they also knew that art was not their area of expertise. Roger is a venture capitalist and co-founder of The Roda Group, while Hans is an award-winning architect and the founder of HDS Architecture. To bring their vision to life, they teamed up with Suzi Hlavacek of Alchemy Station, an art consultant firm, and she helped them hone their ideas into a concrete mission statement:

Create a work of art that is inspiring and impactful. It should catch the eye, engage the mind, and lift the spirit of those who enter and use the building, even at their one hundredth visit. It should ignite innovation and innovative thoughts, and a sense of new energy in the midst of a building that is a center of extraordinary collaboration to create a new knowledge that helps global society be a better and safer place.

After considering over 70 artists from 13 different countries and four continents, the team narrowed their choices down to a small group of finalists. The brothers and the UC Berkeley reps were all unanimous in their selection, sculptor Susan Narduli.

The Los Angeles-based artist is the head of Narduli STUDIO, an award-winning interdisciplinary practice working at the intersection of art, architecture, technology, and public space. Susan has crafted innovative and compelling pieces around the world, specializing in work that is site-specific, meant to capture the energy and meaning of its setting. For the Grimes Engineering Center, she wanted “a visual representation of the transformative nature of discovery and the ever-changing landscape of research,” and asked herself, “How could I create something that would in any way make this hub of creativity and collaboration visual and possibly experiential?”

When visiting the building’s atrium, Susan responded to the simple geometric forms in the space and was taken with the idea of a cube suspended from the ceiling. This led her to the concept of a hypercube, a four-dimensional extension of a cube that exists in an infinite number of dimensions, an idea that struck her as “an expression of the infinite number of possibilities of what could happen within that space.”

Susan’s design consists of two nested cubes, an outer architectural frame and an inner generative core, each defined by points of light arranged in a cartesian grid. Additional, smaller  pixel-like cubes are suspended between the two, to add a random element to the straight-forward layout. The outer and inner cubes operate in dynamic interplay, with thousands of LED lights that glow and fade in mesmerizing patterns. She wanted the animating algorithms that drive these patterns to be “a poetic reimagining of the foundational principles of our physical world, reconceptualized as a light experience,” and so she incorporated mathematical systems, engineering dynamics, and systems in nature into the calculations, including simulations of fluid dynamics, wave behavior, Chladni patterns, Game of Life algorithms, and physarum growth models. The result is a three dimensional light show with ever-shifting patterns and forms, always new and evolving. While the basic structure of the Strauch Hypercube itself is rooted in simple and stable shapes, the light patterns it creates flow and change, never following the same path.

At the inauguration ceremony, Roger called the Strauch Hypercube a “marvelous, dynamic, impactful work of art,” and praised it as a fitting monument to his father’s legacy. Hans agreed, declaring the light sculpture a “timeless, inspirational, and magical piece.” The Strauch Hypercube will now illuminate the atrium of the Grimes Engineering Center for decades to come, providing light and inspiration to new generations of students as they continue the long tradition of innovative and impactful research at UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering.

Strauch Hypercube Inauguration Ceremony, “Innovation & Illumination: The Strauch Hypercube,” October 25, 2025: