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Design

These Intricate Skeletal Forms Were Created Using Tights, Wooden Sticks, & Latex

'Augmented Skin' combines hands-on crafts with digital simulations to create stunning conceptual structures

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Augmented Skin, a new design project, combines hands-on crafts with digital simulations to create stunning conceptual structures. Created by graduates of The Bartlett’s School of Architecture, Kazushi Miyamoto, Youngseok Doo and Theodora Maria Moudatsou, and inspired by the human body, Augmented Skin features fabricated monochromatic forms that reflect skeletal forms wrapped in flesh-like materials.

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To create Augmented Skin, the trio used intersecting wooden sticks as their base frameworks, and then applied software processes to analyze the most efficient structural positions of the sticks. Once formed, the sticks were then wrapped in a tensile fabric, resulting in the mesmerizing skeleton-like exteriors that you see in these photos. The fabric provides a composition that can be cast in a spectrum of different materials, including concrete and plastics, making it an effort in innovation as well as in versatility; the idea to apply elastic-like materials to wooden structures allows for a low-budget casting process with highly experimental results.

In an interview with dezeen, Miyamoto states, “The flexible strand component is able to generate seamless and intricate shapes and space. By altering the size and density of internal sticks we can control the flexibility of detail as well.” Presenting their project through prototypes of a constructed chair and an arch, the team behind Augmented Skin alsoused a digital fabrication program to superimpose their architectures into natural landscapes. The synthetic, symmetric structures resemble natural forms, like sea urchins, spider webs, or even macro images of DNA strands, stretching the possibilities of what's feasible in architecture.

During their time at Bartlett, Miyamoto, Doo, and Moudatsou studied under Daniel Widrig, Stefan Bassing and Soomeen Hahm. Members of the “Custer 6” research collective at the B-Pro: March Graduate Architectural Design postgraduate program at Bartlett’s School of Architecture, Widrig, Bassing and Hahm follow B-Pro’s design perspective on the possibilities of data materialization within new fields. Explains Cluster 6’s vision statement, “The studio is particularly interested in merging traditional, low-tech manufacturing processes with advanced technological approaches to design and realise new spatial concepts.” In this particular project, the professors constrained the students to "freehand self-production in the age of computational design” as a source of inspiration.

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Augmented Skin debuted earlier this year at Bartlett’s B-Pro 2014 graduation show.

See more about the project on Kazushi Miyamoto’s website and on Stefan Bassing’s Cargo Collective page

h/t dezeen

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