Yugyeong Lee Looking Outwards-01

I came across this project called “Arabesque Wall,” by Benjamin Dillenburger and Micahel Hansmeyer in collaboration with Design Exchange. It is a grand 3D printed architectural sandstone wall standing 10 feet tall with intricate details of the Baroque period. Forming almost 200 million surfaces, the details of this architecture is created at a scale of millimeters.  The complexity generated by overlapping curves based on geometric rule imply luxury. By utilizing “algorithms and computation to generate architectural form,” the designers spent four months of iterative computational design process of producing details impossible for one to achieve with bare hand.

As modernist design articulate art of simplicity straying away from the richness of details and ornaments of the past, this project paves way for art/architecture to produce intricacy within a design that no history could afford. Integration of digital fabrication and computational design points towards the future of celebrating overwhelming  and flourishing details. Although this project is closer to a sculpture than an architecture, it could lead to a generation of architecture fabricated entirely of digital fabrication machine such as a 3D printer. However, just as technology contributes both advantage and disadvantage, design itself may be dehumanized with less “touch” of hand in an art work. But because of the possibility of creating projects such as the “Arabesque Wall” with relative ease, it also opens an opportunity for artists to explore limitless complexity in design.