Rediscovered two years ago, researchers are still trying to figure out exactly how the thing works.

A wooden board with metallic lines traveling over and away from painted variables and measuring sticks make up Carlos Gómez Gavazzo’s “development calculator,” which he created in 1960.

The device was actually something useful to Gavazzo, an architect and professor at Uruguay’s University of the Republic in Montevideo. A committed modernist who worked with Le Corbusier in Paris in 1933, Gavazzo built his career by exploring the post-World War II role of developmentalism on Latin America, particularly Uruguay.

Gavazzo taught courses on the theory of population density and the methods of territorial planning. According to MoMA, his calculator is meant to render it all to an exact science, correlating “land use, inhabitation, work, legal forms, investment output or capacity, and quality of life” in order to “determine the existing level of development in a given region which might, in turn, guide policy and design.” ... “Since the ‘50s he had been developing these methodologies that have to do with the conversion between mathematics, graphics, economy, territory and form,” says the curator. “Seeing it by itself, it’s kind of bizarre and strange,” he adds, “but it shows a very interesting relationship between the graphic and scientific aspects of his work.”