Robert Dell (engineer). Robert Dell ( ; 1950) is an American geothermal engineer  and sculptor, renewable energy expert, and was a mechanical engineering professor at The Cooper Union. He is first inventor on eleven registered patents and is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. In 2023 he was awarded the Cobb Partnership Award; The award is presented on average bi-annually to an American who has demonstrated a long commitment to fostering U.S. relations with Iceland and to the building of bridges between the two countries. He is first author on over 30 international, peer-reviewed engineering research papers. Recognized as a progenitor of sustainable art, his work incorporates art and engineering, using geothermal energy to power lasers, LEDs and create color changes in liquid crystals in his large scale stainless steel, bronze, aluminum and copper sculptures. He was a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 1980, a Fulbright Research Fellow in 1988, a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT from 1993-1997, an American Scandinavian Foundation Fellow, and an Honorary Research Associate at the New York Botanical Garden from 2007-2008. In 2021, he was named an American Society of Mechanical Engineers Fellow.

He is the subject of a documentary film, Environmental Alchemy, by Gary Donatelli.

Robert Dell's papers are permanently housed in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian and the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology Archives and Special Collections.

Personal life
Robert Dell was born in 1950 in Nyack, New York. He is married to artist Siena Gillanne Porta. He has three children, Robert, Terrance, and Malcom, and a granddaughter.

Education
Receiving a Bachelors in Education from SUNY Oneonta in 1972, Dell then attended SUNY New Paltz, where he retrained himself as a sculptor, graduated with an MFA in Sculpture in 1975, and was befriended by the sculptor William King.

Career
Robert worked with his brother James in their general contracting company, Dell Brothers. He also worked as a precision TIG welder for Chromalloy on jet engine repairs. At the age of 27, he exhibited his metal and laminated wood sculptures at Vorpal Gallery in the SoHo district of New York City. Subsequent solo exhibitions with Vorpal occurred in Soho, and in their branches in Chicago and San Francisco. Robert also completed Pythagoras a large scale outdoor public sculpture for the Town Hall of Orangetown, New York on a CETA grant in 1978.

In 1980, he was a MacDowell Colony Fellow and was part of the “Sculpture 1980” exhibition at Baltiomore’ Maryland Institute.

Ill health necessitated that he curtailed this work and he retrained as a classical painter and passed the highly competitive exam to become a Scenic Artist with United Scenic Artists Local USA 829 in New York City in 1983.  He painted and sculpted scenery on television series and films including Grace Quigley (1984), One Life to Live (1990-1992), Made (2001), Swimfan (2002), in addition to sets for the Metropolitan Opera and a number of Broadway plays.
On occasion, he was also an Art Director.

The sculpture work restarted, but with an acute awareness of the frailty and the ultimate persistence of life. Large quartz crystal slabs were added as an embodiment of the earth’s energy. This energy was then made visible in the sculptures by converting geothermal heat into electric light during a Fulbright Senior Research Grant to Iceland in 1988, even though he had no academic affiliation. This began his pursuit of engineering.

Geothermal Sculpture
Dell’s geothermal sculptures have an audible hot-water circulation system that emits heat and creates light in what he calls a “slow, rhythmic ‘turtle-time’ cadence.” Using a Peltier system he directly generates electricity from the temperature difference between the geothermal heat source and ambient air.  Geothermal hot water flows through pipes in the sculptures giving them what Dell calls “an almost mammalian circulation system using geothermal energy as its lifeblood.” This causes liquid crystal areas to change colors so that you can literally “see the colors of the wind.”

As a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, Dell developed a “geothermal simulator,” a self-contained, hot-water circulation system with adjustable temperature that uses household current, allowing him to display his pieces in locations that do not have naturally occurring geothermal sources.

Critical Reception
Dell's pieces were met with varied response. While D. Dominick Lombari called his work with geothermal simulators "brilliant" despite the pieces being exhibited indoors at the Blue Hill Cultural center which he likened to "riding a bicycle indoors.", his work displayed the same year at the Firehouse Gallery was called "quite unusual, possibly unprecedented" describing the same simulators as "glorified radiators" that "intrude detrimentally" in his sculptures.

Exhibitions
Robert Dell’s geothermal sculpture was first installed in 1988 at Seltun hotsprings in Iceland as part of his Fulbright Grant. The next geothermal installations were  at Yellowstone National Park’s Grotto, Castle and Old Faithful Geyser Groups in 1996, and at the Great Geysir in Iceland in 1999 when he was an American Scandinavian Fellow to Iceland. His work Hitavaettur Thermal Guardian is on permanent display at the Perlan in Reykjavík, Iceland where it is powered by the municipal geothermal hot water that heats the city.

Dell's work has been shown widely at galleries and museums around the world including in Iceland, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City.

Engineering
Ill health again demanded retraining, this time in engineering and writing.  He joined the Cooper Union’s Albert Nerken School of Engineering, initially as an adjunct professor of design and artist in residence (MIT archive) and soon became an adjunct professor of mechanical engineering and taught senior projects, mechanical engineering  independent study and co-advised master's theses. He was principal investigator for Consolidated Edison on numerous  Steam Engineering grants and was project engineer and research fellow for the Cooper Union and the Cooper Union Research Foundation. In 2005, he became a member of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers following a review by the membership committee, without a formal engineering degree. He went on to be named an ASME fellow in 2021.

Dell was the founding director of the Laboratory for Energy Reclamation and Innovation since 2008, and was the founding director of the Center for Innovation and Applied Technology from 2012 to 2019.

He was appointed at the Cooper Union as director of the Special Project on Select Patent Monetization, with additional appointments as the research fellow for the C.V. Starr Research Foundation.  Other appointments include guest lecturer with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, and Advisory Board Member with Borealis GeoPower Inc. in Canada and visiting scientist with Iceland’s Keilir Institute of Technology.

Dell is the first inventor on eleven registered patents through his work at the Cooper Union. He is the first author of numerous research papers for venues, including the International Conference of Experimental Mechanics (IMECE), The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), The World Geothermal Congress (WGC), The Geothermal Resources Council (GRC), The Geo-Heat Center at the Oregon Institute of Technology, and the Cooper Union Research Foundation. He is an active member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the Geothermal Resources Council (GRC), the American Welding Society (AWS), the Order of The Engineer, and the Municipal Planning Federation of Rockland County.

References

1950 births
Living people
American engineers