PLETHORA  is the first entirely 3D-printed large-scale public artwork, and signifies the peak of form and degree of ornamentation that can be generated with digital manufacturing technologies. At five meters in height, she holds the record as the world's largest 3D-printed steel construction of any kind.

 

Material is, in itself, mute until one utilizes it intelligently and artistically. LuxMea gives metal a poetic dimension and an expressive quality that is not normally associated with this hard, cold material. LuxMea aims to position architecture and industrial design from a part-by-part, linear approach to an integrated one that brings together technology, materials, and production methods.

 

More than a sculpture, PLETHORA is also a manifesto and represents the “Age of Mass Customization®”. As significant as the Industrial Revolution, this forthcoming revolution will be facilitated by rapidly evolving digital fabrication tools, a means that will allow us to breach the barriers between design and manufacturing with no added cost. Such an ability to customize for all is liberating artists, scientists, and businesses, and it is providing, generally, an unprecedented freedom. PLETHORA represents new possibilities in art, design, and architecture in ways thought before as unimaginable. LuxMea studied engineering and manufacturing approaches in the high-tech industries, like avionics, automotive, and sports equipment, and began applying both computation design tools (software) and digital manufacturing tools (hardware) to the design universe.

 

A play with scales is a game PLETHORA initiates with those who look at and approach her. It is a game that that stimulates, and surprises, but never tires. PLETHORA incites us to explore with her the magnificent dawn of the digital era, where physical and virtual worlds blur, and a world where form is finally freed from the industrial era’s axioms of the right angle and endless repetitions of sameness.

 

LuxMea believes it is one of the artist’s roles to aid others in seeing the world in ways that others may not experience, whether this be looking at our environment today, or representing possible futures. The studio’s aim is to help further explain the merits of developing new tectonics, ones that have been not fully understood, nor maximized for the particularities and challenges of our own time. The discipline of architecture, according to LuxMea, has some serious problems in these “Silicon Valley Times”, but at the same time, the studio sees the profession’s uniqueness among many others. Since architecture is rooted in a sub-culture that is three thousand years old, it will remain more relevant than ever before. LuxMea believes that this unique ability to span such a range, coupled with cutting edge digital technology, holds a key to the future!