Mathias Gmachl

Product design intern on a nexorade structure — from geometry research to a walk-through 1:1 VR prototype and grant proposals

Mathias Gmachl co-founded the London design studio Loop.pH and has since worked independently. His practice sits between speculative, architectural, scientific, product and sculptural design. I joined him as a product design intern working on a single long-running enquiry: a nexorade structure that could be built out to a sculptural result at architectural scale.

A nexorade is a structure built from mutually supporting members, each one resting on the next in a closed loop so the whole assembly holds itself up without a central node. I researched the science and structural logic behind it — how the eccentricity, engagement length and member diameter govern whether the geometry closes and where the load travels — and we built on that to work out how far the principle could be pushed sculpturally.

I built the structure parametrically in Rhino and Grasshopper so the geometry could be driven by its variables — member count, length, engagement and rotation — and re-run as the design changed rather than redrawn each time. This let us test structural variations quickly and keep a model that stayed accurate enough to base a real build on.

We then used Fologram, which streams the Grasshopper model into a VR headset at full scale. Instead of judging the structure from a screen we could walk into it at 1:1, read its real height and density, and make changes to the definition while standing inside it. Decisions that were ambiguous on screen — clearance, how the members read overhead, where a person would enter — resolved immediately in the headset.

Bermondsey was our site for one of the proposals, so I researched the area and its history — its industrial and manufacturing past, how the fabric and public space have changed, and what the structure would sit next to and mean there. That research shaped how we positioned the piece in the application.

The research fed into a set of proposals submitted to open calls and grant programmes — packaging the geometry, the site case and the visualisations into applications that had to make the work legible to funders and arts organisations rather than to designers.

While working through the joints I recognised the structure from my own work: the nexorade's reciprocal connection behaves much like the mechanism in TransfoRim, my shape-changing wheel project — members held in relation to each other rather than fixed to a hub, with joints that allow the whole assembly to move as one. Seeing the principle again at architectural scale changed how I read both projects.