Autocheiromorph; Using skeletal joint tracking via computer vision as an intuitive drawing medium | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026

This project proposes that motion tracking via computer vision can function as an active form-making instrument in architectural design: not as a means of recording the body, but of drawing with it. A design pipeline spanning skeletal joint tracking, computational geometry. The designer does not pre-specify form and then represent it; they compose in real time together, calibrating each decision in response to what the process has already produced. Central to this is non-planar printing; where conventional fabrication resolves geometry layer by layer on a fixed plane, the pipeline here allows tool paths to follow the curvature of gesture directly, preserving the spatial character of the movement in the printed output. The trace of the body remains three-dimensional, readable as a record of the decisions that produced it. This positions the output not as a representation of movement but as a notation system: each printed element carries within it the speed, direction, feedback and hesitation of the gesture that generated it, and as the building grows, that notation accumulates into an architectural surface that is also a history of its own making. The process finds its site and programme in Bologna, proposing a research museum and curing facility for Bologna’s DOP products: a building organised around the same logic of continuous calibration that the project has been developing as a design method. The architectural proposition centres on three towers, redeploying a type the city produced according to legends, in its hundreds during the medieval period. This time not solely as a symbol of status but as a thermal instrument. The tower’s height generates a stack effect that draws warm air continuously upward, maintaining the stable, cool conditions in which Parmigiano ages. Additionally, visitor platforms to see all other towers of bologna, from a single viewpoint.

Every Building Block, Focus-Stacked A focus-stacked polyjet print cataloguing every discrete small building block in the project. Each unit is generated through motion tracking, where bodily gesture functions as a drawing instrument; preserving the spatial character of movement in the printed form.

A View from the Tower Across Bologna View from the tower summit, contextualising the project within Bologna’s historic skyline.

Process Video: Design, Digital Space and Print A video walkthrough of the design process; from motion-tracked gesture in digital space to the fabrication of physical representative models. Each stage captures how bodily movement is translated into architectural form.

Garden View: Dependency and Trapped Motion A render from within the garden; each block carries the dependency of the one before it, with motion trapped inside the printed form. Together they accumulate into a notation system; a surface that is simultaneously a record of the gestures and decisions that produced it.

Interior View: The Tasting Room A render from within the tasting room; the interior reveals how the motion-tracked building blocks compose into inhabitable space.

Tower Section; Notation System at Large Scale The section reveals the full scale of the notation system; gesture-driven blocks accumulating tower by tower into a spatial record of their own making. The cut exposes the thermal logic of the towers alongside the movement history embedded within every surface.