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Virtual architecture built in computer-cut cardboard

By Justin Mullins

27 April 2011

IT’S hard to avoid computer-generated images. We are bombarded with them by television, magazines and the internet. But turning these ideas into reality is a big challenge, says Michael Hansmeyer, a computational architect at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

“With all this computing power, it’s been possible to create and display forms as complex as mine in virtual worlds for the last couple of years,” he says. “The challenge was to find a way to get them out.”

Hansmeyer designs his architectural creations with a type of iterative computer program called a subdivision algorithm. To make his…

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