The world's first 3D printed room was completed recently by architect designer Michael Hansmeyer along with Benjamin Dillenburger. After years of trials and test in which the technologies of the computers inability to render such files and the printers inadequate ability to generate the details of the architects vision, the project has finally come to fruition. The work has been called Digital Grotesque, and is an 11 ton installation that the designer are saying is the first 3-D printed room (not that we are expecting many in the future). The work is incredibly ornate, recalling the Rococo and Baroque periods of architecture in a truly 21st century manner.
Hansmeyer hesitates to call the process simply parametric, insisting that the project's algorithms operate "procedurally" at both universal and local scales. "Thus a single algorithm can produce not only the overall form of the room, but also it's local curvatures, concavities, convexities, folds, and creases."
If Hansmeyer and Dillenburger had attempted to print these intricacies using normal printing materials like polymer plastic, they would have had a mess on their hands.Hansmeyer opted instead for sand that, when aggregated with a binding agent, formed a workable sandstone capable of expressing extreme sculptural depth. He and Dillenburger developed a sand printing process that virtually eliminated all constraints exhibited by all other 3-D printing techniques.
The design and refinement process took upward of a year, mostly because 3-D modeling engines couldn’t render or visualize the whole room at once. The installation’s quarter billion surfaces would have crashed the program in no time.
