Here’s a problem he didn’t factor in

Helaman Ferguson is having a bad day in his unheated studio/barn. His 10-year-old compressor has died; the repairman says it’s beyond fixing. The earliest December snowstorm in 20 years is about to delay the hauling of his 9-ton granite sculpture to a corporate client outside Philadelphia.

To top it off, his landlord has declared him a squatter and is evicting him from the old dairy barn he converted -- and has toiled in for four years -- at the Maryland Science and Technology Center in Bowie.

Others in Bowie regard Ferguson, 62, as a national treasure.

He is the Tech Center’s unofficial artist in residence, a world-renowned research mathematician who uses 3-D computer-imaging to turn algorithms into sculpture.

His work has been exhibited in major cities, and he has received national awards. People from all over the world come to Bowie to see the 45-ton granite fountain he created from a formula devised 800 years ago by Italian mathematician Leonardo Pisano, better known as Fibonacci.

“Math is my design language,” said Ferguson, a lanky man with a trimmed white beard who holds a world’s record of sorts for juggling while jogging 50 miles. In the drafty barn, near two large granite pieces, equations are scrawled on sheets of insulation and a chalkboard. The classical music he listens to while he works can be heard hundreds of yards away.

Ferguson’s predicament is the latest wrinkle in the saga of the 466-acre office park. Formerly affiliated with the University of Maryland, it remains largely undeveloped after two decades, having suffered through economic downturns, political problems and foreclosures that landed two former developers in jail.

The land for the office park is under covenants that limit development to research and technology tenants. But Ferguson, who was working in the basement and garage of his Howard County, Md., home, negotiated the use of the barn a few years ago.

Ferguson had been hired by one of the park’s handful of tenants, the Institute for Defense Analyses, a private think tank affiliated with the National Security Agency. In return for rights to the barn, which he spent $80,000 on to convert it into a studio, he agreed to design and build the fountain that sits in the middle of a reservoir at the center, dubbed Lake Fibonacci.

He has worked since without a written agreement but with an unwritten pledge from one of the property owners that he could stay while completing his other large granite pieces.

“He’s the most determined guy I know. He’s done some wonderful things,” said Dean Morehouse, the Tech Center partner who suggested to Ferguson that he use the barn. Morehouse spent “a little over $500,000” on the fountain, which paid for materials, some equipment and 28 concrete pilings driven into the reservoir floor.

Two years ago, Morehouse sold his managing stake in the Tech Center and about half the property -- including the barn -- to the Baltimore-based MIE Co., a builder of office parks and shopping centers. MIE specializes in warehouse-style “flex space,” which is what it wants to build where the barn is.

Ferguson was given until September to complete his work and leave. When the deadline came, he said he needed more time, and MIE let him stay until the end of the year. Now he is between an 11-ton rock -- his latest commission, from Macalester College in Minnesota -- and a hard place.

The new property owners say they will turn off his electric service at the end of this month and then tear down the barn.

“He’s not staying there,” said Ramon Benitez, MIE’s development manager. “He’s, frankly, a squatter at this point.”

Ferguson is no typical squatter. The piece he has just finished but not yet delivered to pharmaceutical giant Merck, an abstract of hands almost shaking, drew a commission “in the low six figures,” Ferguson said.