Kevin Thies – Looking Outwards 03 – Parametric Digital Fabrication

The Morpheus Hotel at the City of Dreams resort in Macau, China, was started in 2013 and finished earlier this year by Zaha Hadid Architects. It’s impressive seeing something so crazy and so obviously designed on a screen come to life. All of those slightly different pieces was fabricated and put into its very specific place. The project was likely made with a combination of Maya and Gehry Technology’s Digital Project modeling software, as director Patrik Schumacher released in an 2014 interview that those were what the company was using at the time. ZHA is well known for their use of parametric design, and this project is just taking that and heavily applying it to the overall facade and structure. Scale-wise that means there’s a lot of almost identical parts that each had to be custom made, something the 1.1 billion-dollar budget reflects.