Digital Grotesque – the new face of architecture.

Entering into the grand 16 square meters of “Digital Grotesque” you could easily mistake it for the intricate interior of a Baroque cathedral in fact what stands before you is the first ever “fully immersive, solid, human-scale enclosed structure entire 3D printed out of sand.

Designed and developed by Swiss architects Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger, the 11 tonne structure exhibits an impressive 260 million surfaces with a layer resolution of 0.13mm.

Speaking on the projects website the team describe the project as “neither foreign nor familiar” as it straddles both chaos and order  and the natural and artificial. The building was not created by traditional design methods rather by an algorithm which at its most basic level gradually refines and enriches a simple input form. Their website stated “any reference to nature or existing styles are not integrated into the design process, but are evoked only as associations in the eye of the beholder”

The project took 13 months to complete with the entire structure built in just one month! Less concerned with functionality than with the expressive formal potentials of digital technologies, the work of Hansmeyer and Dillenburger examines the spatial experiences and sensations that these technologies enable.

Watch the video below

Digital Grotesque . Printing Architecture from Digital Grotesque on Vimeo.