Material: milled Carrara marble, concealed 3D printed polycarbonate nodes reinforced with stainless steel inserts, LED strips and control systemAulosphaera is... Read More
Material: milled Carrara marble, concealed 3D printed polycarbonate nodes reinforced with stainless steel inserts, LED strips and control system
Aulosphaera is a radiolarian skeleton at the scale of architecture: an inhabitable lattice of luminous filaments crowned with radial spines, sculpted in Carrara marble.
The piece takes its geometry from the Phaeodaria, a group of radiolarians studied and drawn by Ernst Haeckel, the German biologist who revealed the hidden architectures of microscopic marine life. In Plate 61 of Kunstformen der Natur (1899–1904), Haeckel drew these organisms as radiant spheres of hollow silica tubes, organic structures of almost cosmic precision. At the heart of the plate radiates a member of the Aulosphaeridae, the family to which Aulosphaera belongs. That image is the origin of the work: a drawing made to see the invisible, translated into a space that can be entered.
Its material closes a geological circle. Carrara marble originates from metamorphosed Jurassic seabeds, formed from marine sediments accumulated over deep geological time. To build a radiolarian in Carrara is to return the stone to the ancient sea from which its geological story began.
Conceived for open landscape, the piece stands as a fossil that breathes light. To walk into it is to enter a body that lived at a scale beneath perception and in a time before the human: deep time and micro scale folded into a single inhabitable present.
Aulosphaera is part of NUR Living Lights’ research into Unseen Architectures, exploring hidden structures that connect the microscopic, the geological and the cosmic.
(Work produced on commission — made to order, not available for immediate shipping.)
