Soft Prosthetics

Soft Prosthetics deals with the phenomena of external internal interfaces of soft boundary engineered tissue augmented and conscious of its performance within a system.

Soft Prosthetics are a thought provoking experiment in which the notion of second order metareproduction with the help of bespoke and augmented technologies such as CAAD is explored and implemented within a virtual continuum that spans from biology, structure and materiality towards ritual performance driven data artefacts . The idea of the digital augmentation of the object and the creation of its reproductive virtual Doppelgänger is on of the key elements of a soft prostethetic in which the aid becomes assimilated, transformed and later accepted by the host and a genetic expression of it. With the experiment of the soft hip replacement I envisage to create a first bridge between the actual in use hip and the abstract of its virtual twin. The aspect of the intraface as a semi automaton device bound in a looped system is as well of great interest as it starts to emerge that the soft aspects of manipulation can be transverse exchanged and create unpredicted mutations to the system itself which at that point leads to a higher form of conscious of the object as it flirts around the notion of hybrid and blurred dependencies.

Digital mimesis and the bespoke imitation through functionality and the principle of action and reaction.

In that field of interst the works of Marjan Colletti are very inspirational when he writes:

"Rooted in the Heideggerian unison of techne /craftsmanship and poesis art, CAAD reveals and brings forth forces of metareproduction. A second order making that produces something that reproduces something. The first something fluctuates in a digital limbo ( limbo seen as Intraface_ a homologous framework bounded inside a controlled feedback system) of constructs that exist somewhere between images and things. These intermediary constructs convey 2,5D qualitative properties (rather than quantitative parameters), and mediate authentic digitality with projected reproduction. "

synthetic syncretism

Synthetic Syncretism is about the artificial condensation and unification of different religions and cultures as well as spatial concepts and design techniques. The portfolio’s narrative background is based upon the hybrid Cuban religion of Santeria (a mixture between Catholicism and the African Yoruba tribe beliefs). As a result of this unusual syncretism an altered kind of religion evolved which hybridises Catholic Saints with animals and Sakralraum with sacrifices. The necropolis Christobal Colon, the main cemetery, does not provide enough burial space hence the proposal for a processional route through the city of Havana for a ceremonial funeral in the sea. Along this processional route the ‘Chapel of Our Lady de Regla’ acts as architectural highlight. Slotted inside an existing cross shaped courtyard, this inverted chapel contains a series of Santerian relics and utensils condensed from the virtual into the actual. Tweaked to the max, skeleteral and visceral at the same time, these ‘cybrid’ objects, 3D modeled and 3D printed in order to perfectly fi t animal bones found on the site in Cuba, and 3D scanned into virtuality and re-moulded into actuality in London, provide, on a smaller scale, the formal expression for the larger architectural intervention.

At face value computer-aided architectural design (CAAD) merely performs within the domain of what is best described by the German term Technik (it expresses technology, technic and technique). The truth is that CAAD overcomes the dichotomy between technē (craftsmanship) and poiēsis (art). Although digitally driven, the project does not succumb to the pervasive allurement of ‘Parametric Digital Modernism’—the unspecified whitewash (actually grey) of 3D surfaces, the universal Sachlichkeit of algorithmic design techniques, and the mechanistic vision of input-output interactivity.

The diploma provides an impeccable example of syncretism of contemporary CAD techniques and CAD/CAM technologies with site specific design narratives, intuitive non-linear design processes, and historical architectural references. The project shows the architect as the creator-craftsman that finally has the chance to overcome the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century schism of intellectual from manual labour, as well as the nineteenth-century gulf between automatic mechanisation and poetic creation. The work tries to re-enacts a very challenging architectural conversation on ritualistic objects, pre-Modern typologies, and religious ornaments.