The Shape Was Not Carved. It Was Calculated.
It looks spread by hand. It was calculated.
This wall looks like cream that has just been spread. No hand ever touched it.
It stands in a restaurant. We did not design the restaurant; our part was the method and the build of this one wall.
Drawn Is Not Yet Built
A wall like this has to pass two gates: it has to be drawable, and it has to be buildable. The drawing gate is the easy one. On screen you can keep changing it until you are happy. The hard part is getting it off the screen and into fourteen square metres of wall you can walk up to and touch.
Where the Shape Comes From
The shape was not carved. It was calculated. We wrote the software ourselves; change one number and the whole wall changes with it. The first version came out wrinkled at the centre of every swirl, ring crowding against ring. That was a problem we ran into on our own screen. The algorithm was rewritten from the ground up before it ran smooth.
Try the Small One, and the Big One Is No Gamble
Getting the maths right is not enough. We printed a small one first and held it: what the screen hides, the hand finds. Once the small one had been through that, the big one was no longer a gamble. It was milled at full size, wrapped in a reinforcing skin, and carried into the site in three pieces, which is why the wall has two seams.
How, we keep to ourselves. The two site photographs in the film were taken from the same spot: in one the seams show, in the other they do not. Everything between them is this one problem.
"It looks spread by hand. It was calculated."
If you want a wall in your shop that no one else can build, bring the idea and the site, and we will run the numbers together first.