www.designboom.com: a fully immersive, human-scale architectural object, created by michael hansmeyer and benjamin dillenburger emerges as the first life-sized construction to be entirely 3D printed out of sandstone. 'digital grotesque' is now a realized space, consisting of two individual halves that form an aggregate volume -- the grotto. from the outside, the structure presents itself as a cubical mass, but its interior hides an intricate geometry of millions of design facets. the room's impossible ornamentation and free-form geometries represent a paradigm shift within the field of digital fabrication.
6 comments:
This machine is truly remarkable for the time. I would have never guessed that this machine would be made from a 3D printer which has a resolution of a tenth of a millimeter. This design is like nothing I've ever seen before in my life and the amount of detail is incredible. I wonder how long it took for the printer to produce this structure that contains 260 million facets. The structure looks incredible minus the small gap between the pieces which take away from the overall structure. Just seeing this creation puts 3D printing technology so far over my head, I cant imagine what they could possibly create in the future. 3D printers are relatively new at a consumer level and this printer could do some remarkable detail work thats going to be difficult to out do.
All I see is the seams every 4 feet. Just kidding. The (unfinished?) object is clearly beautiful, and the design that went into it is impressive and well realized. The complex imbrication of competing surfaces and patterns that still somehow find cohesion brings to mind for me the courtyards of Angkor Wat, the ceiling of The Great Mosque of Cordoba, as well as Geiger's set design for "Aliens," begging the question:
With every improvement in our ability to replicate the world we can imagine digitally in the analog we inhabit, do we lose some degree of our sense of wonder?
We ask with increasing ignorance, "How did they ever do that?" While the magnificence of sites like Angkor Wat and The Great Mosque inspire a sense of awe at the abilities of the throng of wood and stone carvers that toiled for decades to create a space of mesmerizing intricacy, I have a much harder time being inspired by the contrivance of servos and capacitors and bytes that produced this digital grotesque. It is estimated to have taken 35 years to build Angkor Wat, which means multiple generations of carvers and masons worked on it, their entire lifetimes consumed by the acquisition and implementation of their art. Digital design and printing allows us to short-change this life-long process, and I think the consequences of that in art and design are heretofore unforeseen.
For me art and artistry are a measure of our likeness to god (little "g"), a physical representation of our search for worth in the universe and an aspiration that reaches beyond our finite existences. Applying this assertion to 3D printing, one might wonder if god is a robot.
I must be missing something about this structure because the article title leads me to think they printed a room in a single print. Come to find out it is actually multiple segments of smaller sections, I was slightly disappointed. Yes the design process that went into this structure is very impressive but the same could have been done with any 3d Printer and then stacked as they did with this structure. I would like to see just how they went about drawing up this piece and sectioned it for printing.
This is really cool. 3D printing, in general, fascinates me but this, at such a large scale, it's amazing. Technology has really brought design to a whole new place. This reminds me of this girl who began 3D printing and laser cutting records that actually work on a record player. Sure it's on a smaller scale, but it's just amazing what we could do with technology. It also makes me think of times before technology. How were these huge structures made?! There had to be a person who just carved everything perfectly by hand.
So yes, I find this amazing, but sometimes I wonder if technology has been taking over the magic we can do with our hands. I don't know. More people seem to be going towards 3D printing than actually sculpting and building things with their hands. I am not very good at digital modeling and I personally prefer the hands on projects because I feel like the emotions I go through while creating help me bring a piece to life.
I agree with Andrew. Realizations like this are very impressive, but the human component is missing, and I think I might be quicker to dismiss something like that grotto than a picture of a monument from ancient times.
Although there is another dimension to it, that's not directly related to the project but to the machine itself. When I see something like this, I'm actually awe-struck at the fact that someone designed and engineered a machine capable of making something like that crazy grotto contraption. I think I could have the same type of reaction in front of an insane piece of technology as I have had when seeing great monument from thousands of years ago and wondering how they could have ever been built.
There's 2 things that strike me as amazing in this project:
1. That a 3d printer can print things so precisely.
2. That someone was able to dream up such complex and intricate line work. On one hand the design looks very hard and robotic. On the other hand, the whole structure has a type of romantic feel to it.
It looks like an alien version of classical Rome. It has a scifi feeling to it, maybe it's just me.
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