Layer Lines as Ornament — Letting the Process Show
Every printed object carries the record of its own making in fine horizontal lines. Most makers sand them away. The house has started to keep them.
Look closely at any 3D-printed object and you will see it: a stack of fine horizontal lines, each one the edge of a layer of material laid down and fused to the one below. In industry the lines are a defect. They are filled, sanded, primed and painted until the surface is indistinguishable from a moulded part, and a great deal of the cost of a printed object is the cost of hiding how it was made.
For its first two years the house did the same. Then it made the Strata Collar and left the lines on.
Why the lines were kept
The decision came from a stone. On a cliff face in Petra the strata are not a flaw in the rock; they are the reason anyone looks at it. Each band is a season of deposition, and the eye reads the whole face as time made visible. A print is the same thing at a smaller scale and a faster clock. Each layer is a minute or two of the machine's day, and the object is a diary of the hours it took to make.
To sand that away is to erase the only evidence that the piece was built rather than cast. The house came to feel that this was a kind of dishonesty, and that the alternative, keeping the lines and making them beautiful, was harder and more interesting.
Making a defect into a surface
A layer line kept by accident looks like an accident. A layer line kept on purpose has to be designed. The height of each layer is now chosen for how the lines will read at the viewing distance the piece is meant for: fine on a collar, seen from a metre away; coarse on a wall relief, seen from across a room. The orientation of the piece on the printer is chosen so that the lines follow the form rather than cut across it, the way grain follows a plank.
Then the lines are sealed rather than sanded, so that light catches each edge and the surface takes on the shallow relief of a fingerprint. On the Monolith Studies this is the entire finish. The surface is called raw stratum in the house's catalogue, and nothing is added to it.
Where the lines are still removed
Not everywhere. Any surface that touches skin is honed smooth, because a line that is ornament to the eye is friction to the body. The inner face of the Strata Collar is polished to glass while the outer keeps every layer. The piece changes character as it is turned in the hand, and that change is the point.
The house does not believe that showing the process is always right. It believes that hiding it should be a decision, not a habit.