Year: 2022
Location: Designmuseum Danmark

Soft Structure No. 5

The piece explores how digital fabrication can be used to develop a design language in which complexity becomes a structural and aesthetic resource rather than a limitation. Instead of reducing form to meet technical constraints, the work treats complexity as something that can be calculated, tested, and sustained through digital fabrication.

Drawing from organic references—such as lungs, butterfly wings, melting ice and floral forms—the object investigates how repetition, folds and layered geometries can be pushed to the edge of what is materially and technically possible. These references are not translated literally, but inform a generative process in which variation emerges through the controlled repetition of a single profile.

The project operates in the tension between precision and unpredictability, where minor deviations in geometry, layering and material behaviour become part of the final expression. Digital fabrication allows the form to remain detailed and dense while retaining structural coherence.

Rather than simplifying form to accommodate production, the piece uses digital fabrication to test material behaviour and structural limits, allowing ornamentation to emerge as an integrated part of the object, where structure, surface and production logic are inseparable.

 
Soft Structure No. 5, large-scale translucent 3D-printed sculpture installed at Designmuseum Danmark, 2022.
Close-up of Soft Structure No. 5 showing layered, translucent 3D-printed surface texture and reflective light.
Detail of Soft Structure No. 5 highlighting the visible layered structure from large-scale 3D printing.

Photos by Magda Buczek