Nick Friesl and Sukarnan Kirupalingam have spent most of their professional lives saying yes.
Yes to something new and unusual, yes to custom work, yes to difficult engineering challenges, yes to unusual materials, and yes to projects others have turned down because they couldn’t figure out how to do them.
As a result, GSF Ltd. - the company Friesl owns and operates along with his partner Kirupalingam - recently completed a once in a lifetime project at MOMI, the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York.
It started over a year ago when a New York-based company they have been subcontracting for for years, approached them about a project so complicated and unusual many others had turned it down.
But not Friesl and Kirupalingam.
“That’s why we are in this business, we like challenges and we like doing new things,” Friesl said. So they looked at the project, thought about it for a few days and then said yes.
Friesl said he figured out the basics fairly quickly - or at least he thought he did. But today he also admits that if he had known then what he knows now, he might have actually said no.
The challenge was to design and build sound absorbing panels for the inside of a large new theatre that is part of a threeyear, $67-million renovation of the museum located in the former Astoria Studios complex, Paramount Pictures’ 1920s East Coast production headquarters.
However, this was not your average theatre with straight walls and ceilings.
Instead, the architect - Thomas Leeser of LEESER Architecture, an internationally acclaimed studio - had designed something much more organic looking. The inside of the new, 267-seat theatre, with walls and ceilings made of nearly 1,200 triangular, felt-covered panels in a vivid Yves Klein blue, seems to wrap around moviegoers to envelop them fully into the film experience.
GSF was handed a ‘Rhino’ drawing of what the space should look like and then had to figure it out from there. They needed to find a way to make the triangular panels that had to be sound absorbing, light and strong, bendable to varying shapes and covered in felt to meet the required sound properties. And of course cost was a factor as well.
GSF has decades of experience in custom woodworking. Their in-house capabilities cover everything from engineering and design support to finished product. Friesl said they do everything from fully digital shop drawings to CNC machining, custom veneering and layout and advanced finishes.
In addition, GSF will use custom glass surfaces, straight or curved, they offer full blacksmithing and metal work, as well as custom leather, acrylic and upholstery work.
In other words, if you can think it up, GSF can build it.
So naturally, when he was approached about the MOMI project, Friesl wasn’t about to turn down a new challenge.
“But it was a much bigger project than we thought,” he now says.
It took them months just to figure out the materials and how they would be used, how to design the intricate shapes and the layout of all 1,200 pieces and how they would fit together to match the architect’s plan and vision.
As always, Friesl and Kirupalingam, who said there is no way they could have completed the project without the help of some key people, took advantage of their experience and connections to come up with the right people for a complex and difficult job.
Most importantly, according to Friesl was his son Marcus - a Los Angeles-based architect - who made it possible to complete the project. Then there is his wife Christa who works at the company and provides important support.
In addition to the right people he also needed the right suppliers and he said Kai Leather, Spectrum Plastic and George Lawson who single-handedly placed 60,000 rivets to assemble the pieces, all came through in a big way.
Custom work is what GSF is all about. They are used to having to come up with new and innovative ways to do things, but this project stretched even their abilities and imagination.
After some sleepless nights and serious design engineering work, they came up with a combination of materials to make the triangles. Ranging in size from one to three feet per side, most are made using an aluminum frame, vacuum shaped plastic, fiberglass and felt covering.
But engineering the panels was just one part of the job. The other was the complex design of the panels to fit the complex shape of the room.
Friesl’s son Marcus did the computer modeling and engineering. While some 800 pieces were straight and relatively easy once they had figured out how to make them, the other 400 or so had different shapes and curves. And all of the pieces had to have an ‘address’ identifying them by size, shape, orientation and location in what was essentially a giant jigsaw puzzle.
Friesl smiles as he talks about it all fitting together perfectly.
“It was great, Marcus did a great job with the plan, if it hadn’t fit together perfectly, we would have been finished.”
In 1972, after graduating from university in Rosenheim, Germany an engineering school for woodworking, Friesl came to Canada to work for Reff, now Knoll. He worked for the company until 1986 when he saw an opportunity and bought into GSF Ltd. as a partner. Over the years he transformed the company from focusing mainly on store fixtures into a contract furniture company. Housed in a 19,000-squarefoot- shop in Mississauga, the company’s main focus has been the American market.
“We did work from Florida to Los Angles and New York,” Friesl says, but added these days the majority of their work is in New York. Most of the business comes from a few larger companies that regularly hire GSF as a subcontractor – leading to projects such as the recent MOMI job. But Friesl is also acutely aware of the dangers of putting all your eggs in one basket, a lesson learned after 9/11. He said the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks affected them badly because every single New York contract just stopped. Their American partners went out of business and GSF was struggling and had to basically start over from scratch developing new partnerships and making new connections.
“It was a difficult time and many people who did business in New York were affected, but we made it through that,” he said.
Friesl had just completed another quote when we met at his shop where workers were busy filling a large order of custom-made boardroom tables for a well-known New York-based financial firm. The shop is equipped with the kinds of tools one would expect to see. CNC, foursider planer, widebelt sander, an edgebander and a paint booth among others. Nothing unusual really. What is unusual though is that none of it was used for the MOMI project. In fact the entire project was completed offsite, more proof that problem solving and thinking out of the box were key to making this project possible.
The big museum job was a rarity, a once-in-a-lifetime project as Friesl describes it. But their bread and butter job is the kind of specialty custom work they have been doing for years.
“We have our regular customers and that’s our main business, but on any given day the phone may ring and a friend of a friend of a friend might approach me with a new, unexpected project,” Friesl said. “That’s the way the business works. You never know who or what is coming through the door next.”
And that’s exactly what Friesl and Kirupalingam like so much about what they do. Friesl said in this business you have to have passion and be open to new things. If you don
’t, you might as well stay home. Friesl doesn’t know what the MOMI project will mean for the company, there may be referrals and new jobs as a result of their innovative work in New York, but he doesn’t know for sure and he won’t count on it or rely on it. He has already moved on to the next job, another new quote another potential ‘yes.’
“Everything we do is custom, it’s new and often surprising, it’s never exactly the same and that’s just the way we like it,” Friesl said.
