Digital Grotesque, created by architects and programmers Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger, is the first fully immersive, solid, human-scale, enclosed structure that is entirely 3D printed out of sand. This structure, measuring 16 square meters, is materialized with details at the threshold of human perception. Every aspect of this architecture is composed by custom-designed algorithms.
The resulting architecture does not lend itself to a visual reductionism. Rather, the processes can devise truly surprising topographies and topologies that go far beyond what one could have traditionally conceived.
Digital Grotesque is between chaos and order, both natural and the artificial, neither foreign nor familiar. Any references to nature or existing styles are not integrated into the design process, but are evoked only as associations in the eye of the beholder.
As a fictive narrative space, the Digital Grotesque project is less concerned with functionality than with the expressive formal potentials of digital technologies. It examines new spatial experiences and sensations that these technologies enable. As such, Digital Grotesque is a lavish, exhilarating space, full of details at the threshold of perception, waiting to be discovered and spurring one’s imagination of what is yet to be created.
Digital Grotesque coating processBeing the first human-scale immersive space, Digital Grotesque entirely constructed out of 3D printed sandstone. A complex geometry consisting of millions of individual facets is printed at a resolution of a tenth of a millimeter to dimensions of a 3.2-meter high, 16 square meter large room. Its geometry was entirely designed through customized algorithms.
You can learn more on the project’s design and process at http://www.digital-grotesque.com/