Digital Grotesque I by Michael Hansmeyer

I want to talk about the project "Digital grotesque" from the architect Michael Hansmeyer.

A fully immersive, human-scale architectural object, created by michael hansmeyer and benjamin dillenburger emerges as the first life-sized construction to be entirely 3D printed out of sandstone. ‘digital grotesque‘ is now a realized space, consisting of two individual halves that form an aggregate volume — the grotto. from the outside, the structure presents itself as a cubical mass, but its interior hides an intricate geometry of millions of design facets. the room’s impossible ornamentation and free-form geometries represent a paradigm shift within the field of digital fabrication.

In this project, the architect sought to create an architecture that does not lend itself to classification and conventional views. He uses mathematical algorithms to create a form of synthetic and organic at the same time, showing a subtle between expected and unexpected. Algorithms are deterministic, since they do not include randomness, but the results are not necessarily completely predictable. Instead they can surprise.

The resulting architecture does not lend itself to visual reductionism.
"Digital Grotesque is between chaos and order, both natural and artificial, neither foreign nor familiar.Any references to nature or existing styles are not integrated into the design process, but are called only as associations in the eyes of the viewer."

The Digital Grotesque project uses additive technology. Digital Grotesque is a completely immersed, solid, closed-scale human structure with a puzzling level of detail. Its geometry consists of hundreds of millions of individual faces, printed with a resolution of a tenth of a millimeter, and represents a large room measuring 16 square meters in height, 3.2 meters high.

In the Digital Grotesque project, every detail of the architecture is generated through customized algorithms, without any manual intervention. A simple input form is recursively refined and enriched, culminating in a geometric mesh of 260 million individually specified facets. This single process generates many scales of architecture, from the overall form with its broad curvature, to local surface development, down to minute textures.

Virtual:
• Algorithmically generated geometry
• 260 million surfaces
• 30 billion voxels
• 78 GB production data

Physical:
• Sand-printed elements
(silica and binder)
• 6 square meters, 3.2 meters high
• 5.8 tons of printed sandstone
• 0.30 mm layer resolution, 300 dpi
• 4.0 x 2.0 x 1.0 meter maximum
print space

Design Development:
Printing:
Assembly:
1 year
1 month
1 day

all information from the official website:
http://www.michael-hansmeyer.com