Chromoteca | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026

Chromoteca is a Contemporary Material Archive proposed for Via di San Vitale, Bologna, a building developed through a computational tool of my own making. The project began with the construction of a slit-scan instrument on TouchDesigner that captures material colour data and translates it into three-dimensional form. Initially tested on foraged studio materials, the tool was later applied to objects from the UCL Institute of Making, generating geometry from surface colour alone. This output became the generative basis for the building: the resulting shapes informed the footprint, and the same coordinate-to-colour logic was extended across the façade, where each panel carries a unique tone derived from its position in space. The programme, a contemporary material archive for the study and public display of materials, is a direct extension of the method: a building whose purpose is to engage with material culture, produced by a tool that reads material as data. The tool functions less as a form-finder and more as an architectural instrument. Its outputs are the product of sustained material testing, deliberate manipulation of inputs, and repeated evaluation against design intent.

Slit-Scan Experiment Foraged studio materials fed through a slit-scan tool built in TouchDesigner. The instrument samples pixels along a single line, pushing each frame to the left and interpolating colour values to produce continuous colour bands. The experiment tested how physical material surface translates into spatial colour data.

Material Classification Slit-scan outputs organised by experimenting with different ordering systems, each defined by a specific material category or rule, to understand how sequence of input shapes the geometry and colour of the output.

3D Printed Outputs Digital forms derived from the slit-scan were 3D printed to trace the project’s full trajectory: physical object to colour input, colour input to digital geometry, digital geometry back to tangible artefact.

Façade Views TRendered views of the Contemporary Material Archive, Bologna. The façade gradient is generated directly from panel coordinates, each panel carrying a unique tone produced by the same slit-scan logic developed throughout the project.

Chromoteca The final film follows the complete arc of the project: materials from the UCL Institute of Making processed through the slit-scan tool, the manipulation of the resulting geometry, and the architectural proposal. Method and building as one