Tactile Tectonics

Senses provide humans a framework to observe and under- stand the world around us. In understanding the human’s approach to experience through the senses we found our cnc milling strategy. One sense that we wanted to utilize with our cnc milling strategy is touch. One can recognize the importance of touch as a sense when visiting historical sculptures. One notices highly polished areas where thousands, if not millions, of hands have felt the metal of these sculptures slowly changing the material into a highly burnished surface.

Wanting to provide a similar experience with our brick proposal, we accelerated the process with bringing together a high-tech and low-tech tooling methods. With the combination of cnc milling and hand planing we have created a brick that appears to have been set out in a popular city square and thousands of tourists have run their hands over the undulating surface.