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Title
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Crystallizing Architecture: From Salt to Skin
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Description
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This image captures a moment where architecture begins to behave less like an object and more like an organism.
Rooted in a material study of salt crystallization, the project investigates how mineral growth - shaped by evaporation, time, and environmental exposure - can inform architectural form and façade systems. Inspired by the Great Salt Lake, the experiments allowed salt to act not as a finish or metaphor alone, but as an active collaborator. Through experimentation of submerged and wicking processes, crystalline surfaces emerged with varying densities, fractures, and translucencies each holding a record of the conditions that shape it.
These fragile formations were then digitally translated through structured-light scanning and photogrammetry, transforming ephemeral growth into architectural meshes. Deployed across a high-rise façade, the resulting surface reads as both geological and constructed: a vertical landscape formed through gradual layers of growth rather than forced into form. Growth becomes geometry. Decay becomes information.
What began as a small, domestic experiment expanded into an architectural proposition - one that asks how buildings might embody environmental processes than suppress them. Here, architecture becomes an organism - one that grows, adapts, and transforms through the collaboration of material, maker, and nature.
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Date
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2026-01-24
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Creator
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Medina, Roberto
