Haptic Flesh

Other - Exhibition, 2018

Haptic Flesh speculatively explores the notion of Architectural Flesh: a conceptual metaphor, countering the reductive understanding of architectural substance as a thin, flat, distant skin, and instead revisiting it as a thick, voluminous and tangible entity. We believe that this novel understanding of architectural substance offers a unique opportunity to turn it into an active, three-dimensional interface that cultivates an intensified tactile relationship between architecture and its users.

The exhibited piece is a product of a hybrid creative development, in which advanced computation and handicraft meet with the goal to develop an alternative architectural expression of the Flesh. The process of making features complex digital modeling, robotic forming and multilayered manual silicone casting.

The alternative expression for the Haptic Flesh is captured in a single architectural object as a blend of mystical tangibility, stratified coloration and undulating bulkiness of volumetric form. As the component of architectural space, the Haptic Flesh has the potential to become a decorative spatial partition, an infill in a wall aperture, a screening device in a window opening, or a freestanding structure with an emergent affordance of its own.

Haptic Flesh is a part of an artistic research project Architectural Convertibles, carried out at the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, and funded by the Swedish Research Council Vetenskapsrådet.