Luca’s Commission

This piece was created for Luca Di Gregorio’s masters architecture thesis which explores a Morphogenetic approach to materials and building. This approach prioritizes process, experimentation, material properties and performance over a historical/image based approach.

The space is built through a series of castings that occur on site allowing the materials to respond and interact as they may throughout each process. The final form develops a texture which expresses a record of its process of making.

This piece is meant to represent the resulting form of an aluminum and concrete casting which originated from a mound of the earth.

Above: process work and 3D printed reference model. Unfortunately, casting in aluminum was not an option so I had to get a bit creative. First, the inner shape was made by taping pieces of copper foil together which were then soldered. A layer of pieces of paper were then added on the outside to conceal the sticky side of the foil, act as a buffer to heat, and create a stronger structure. The outer layer was composed of various-sized strips of copper foil which held in pieces of concrete, and solder was applied in various layers to create dimension.