The end of Bauhaus
"Draped" arises from a critical engagement with contemporary digital fabrication technologies, confronting the ontological shift they provoke within industrial production. Beyond their capacity for additive or subtractive manufacture, these tools inaugurate a new regime of plasticity, where form is no longer constrained by material resistance, but flows from the logics of simulation and parameterization.
Anchored in Bauhaus precedent—when Mart Stam bent a length of steel tubing into the first cantilever chair, proving that an industrial conduit could become pure spatial poetry—Draped accepts that digital fabrication sweeps away such material certainties: what was once standard and rigid now opens into variability, where rigidity unfolds into topological freedom. (My own Bauhaus-inflected training had always treated design as the transformation of one product into another: if you bent the pipe well, the result could never be “worse” than the pipe itself).
Confronted with the near-infinite plasticity of additive manufacturing, however, I found myself without usable references. The material hierarchies I relied on had dissolved; the spectrum of 3-D printing felt open, variable, topologically free—and directionless.
To find a new axis, we turned to the art museum, searching for forms whose expressive freedom might translate into this industrial context. There, the drape emerged as a motif worth re-coding: a gesture born in sculpture and painting, now re-examined through tool-paths and layer heights, offering a language of fluidity and structure for the digital age. The choice also echoes a deeper material parallel: whereas the traditional loom builds cloth by interlacing warp and weft, contemporary additive machines build surfaces by stacking layers along the z-axis. In this shift from crossing threads to layered deposition, the drape gains fresh technical relevance—foreshadowing the layered strategies I continue to explore.
Constructing topologies
The drape motif—historically tied to gesture, contingency, and movement—operates in several registers. Physics simulation reveals how cloth might fall; art-historical observation uncovers canonical rhythms of pleat and counter-curve; stylized modelling translates both into a machine-readable surface.
Originally that surface was destined for large-scale metal 3-D printing, but when our WAAM partner shut down during the COVID crisis, the project was forced to pivot. Additive paths gave way to a subtractive, layered strategy that could be realized in-house on our CNC router. More than 400 slices of 10 mm maritime-pine plywood were milled, numbered, and vertically stacked to build the console’s undulating body.
New craftsmanships
Algorithmic processes initiated the fold, yet its tactile authority was reclaimed in post-processing: every layer had to be hand-sanded until the stepped topography softened into true drapery. The finished object therefore embodies a hybrid ontology: born of digital precision, completed by manual intelligence. Rather than oppose these two regimes, the project celebrates their collision, proposing a new craftsmanship—and with it, new cultural narratives—anchored precisely in the tension between machine and hand, between automated generation and human contingency.
Draped studies
