After 3D printing, CNC milling machine and handmade models, a laser cutting machine arrived in the studio. It left directly from the manufacturer in Shanghai and arrived in the studio and now works alongside the other equipment in our small workshop.

AEON Mira 7S 80W
AEON Mira 7S 80 W
Lasercutter nozzle

Some might ask, as with CNC, “What does this have to do with an architectural firm?”

It has to do, again, with the way of thinking about the project.

We continue to believe that the project does not end on the screen. That it needs hands, matter, resistance. That little physical friction that turns a hypothesis into a new question. Each new instrument that enters the studio is not an end point: it is another way to interrogate what we are imagining.

The laser does a seemingly simple thing-cuts, etches, writes on matter-but it does it with a precision that the hand does not possess, and with a speed that surprises you. You draw a line, press a button, and after a few moments that line exists, has become wood, cardboard, plexiglass. A threshold crossed.

There is the same amazement as in the first 3D printing: the idea coming out of our hands, becoming autonomous, and precisely because of that it observes us from the outside. We ask it new questions, because now it is there, no longer inside the head.

It does not replace anything. It does not replace the cardboard, the pins, the balsa, the hands shaping plasticine. It is added. It mixes. It becomes part of a studio language made up of different instruments that coexist, each with its own voice.

We continue to believe that the project advances by steps, trial and error and contradictions, and that each new technology in the studio serves mainly to keep that question alive: what if we imagined…?