The world's most complex architecture: cardboard columns with 16 million facets

Michael Hansmeyer uses algorithms invented by Pixar and painstaking handicraft to generate columns with dizzying detail.

When people mistake photographs of your physical prototypes for computer renderings, you know you've achieved something amazing. That's exactly what happened when Michael Hansmeyer showed off his "computational architecture" column, created by iterating a subdivision algorithm over and over again and then fabricating it out of cardboard.

Hansmeyer's column stands nine feet tall, weighs about 2000 pounds, and is made out of 2700 1mm-thin slices of cardboard stacked on top of wooden cores. It contains somewhere between 8 and 16 million polygonal faces -- too complex for even a 3D printer to handle, according to Hansmeyer. "Every 3D printing facility we spoke to turned us down," he tells Co.Design. "Typically those machines can't process more than 500,000 faces -- the computer memory required to process the data grows nonlinearly, and it also gets tripped up on the self-intersecting faces of the column."

Check out the slide shows at the link below and at Michael Hansmeyer's personal site.

[Thanks Mason!]