Wednesday, May 01, 2019
Concr3de wants to 3D print Notre-Dame's new gargoyles from rubble
www.fastcompany.com: When Notre-Dame was partially destroyed during a fire this month, the world mourned not just the loss of the building, but the ornate stone details that didn’t survive. Architecture firms are already racing to propose plans to rebuild the cathedral’s roof, but one company is proposing a plan to resuscitate its fallen gargoyles and chimeras–by transforming the rubble and ashes into material that can be 3D-printed into exact replicas.
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4 comments:
Wow this article goes right back to what I was talking about just a few weeks ago on a post about the 3d scans of the Notre Dame Cathedral. Technology is growing and its growing fast. 3d printing is a field that when it first started to grow everyone wanted to jump on and look for new things to do with it. For most people this just meant small scale plastic parts or prototypes/models nothing quite yet useful to us in the scenery business or construction business. Since then in the past year or two I have started to see different materials being 3d printed and different scales/types of machines. The first of which and most popular I have seen are the cement machines designed to "print" houses. Now while in theory I guess they are similar to that being suggested in this article I still haven't seen them with high a resolution of "print" as I think would be desired for a think like the gargoyles of Notre Dame
I am a huge proponent of this type of reconstruction. Not only does it use the same material that the original structures were crafted from, but it also represents exactly what the unique piece was displaying. Although many people have ethical problems with this type of construction, it does play very well with modern technology and the advances we’ve seen over the past several years. At the end of the day, people are really after the replica and to be able to say that it is made from the same material.
I do see the argument for the traditional sculpture methods, but I think a full blow reproduction would carry more weight than completely resculpturing the art. My proposed solution is to make the 3D print models and if people are not interested in the recreation then approach the idea of a rebuild. Even if people don’t like the 3D print, it is almost a guarantee that people will purchase them to make back the original fabrication cost.
The idea of recycling the ashes from the very same gargoyles is astonish to me at first glance, but after finishing up this article, now I am a supporter to their cause. There are several good reasons to do it, including both spiritual and economical reasons. In practical, I would suggest using the same raw material, not recycling the ashes, but since stone 3D printing technology requires grinding the material anyway, grinding ashes rather than bringing in whole chunk of stone seemed relatively reasonable. Combining the poetic meaning of “forged from ashes”, it will be a geeky result of the collaboration between art and technology. There is a debate about how to “re-construct” Notre Dame, and the argument I am obsessed is that how to highlight the meaning of this very moment in the longstanding history of Notre Dame? How to repair the lost of material and remain its historical meaning? The way I am looking it is that no matter how we do it, we have to remember the past of this architecture, and the facts along with it.
I think this is a really cool idea and really speaks to how far technology has come in such a short amount of time. 3D printing has rapidly gone from a cool unique curiosity into an incredibly versatile technology that can be used to create things from synthetic hearts to be used for transplant to uses such as this one. The idea of using the same stone and ash is interesting on several fronts- the metaphorical nature of reconstructing the cathedral from its own ash is obviously significant, as is the idea that by using technology we could actually create something more authentic than trying to recreate it by hand. That idea seems paradoxical, because we tend to judge artistic works by how much labor and effort was put into them. Society has this idea that things created by hand are inherently more ‘authentic’ and more real and valuable, partially because it represents the labor that went into it, and the usage of technology makes it more ‘fake’ and lazy. I wonder what the people who believe this idea have to say about what Concr3de wants to do- on several fronts, it would be truly the most authentic way to reconstruct.
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