Wedge Transforms London Storefront with 3D Printed Sand Facade

Wedge presents a new façade intervention at The Black Shop in King’s Cross that treats the building’s street-facing surface as a living interface between digital data and public space.

The project begins with a LiDAR scan of the storefront, capturing a dense cloud of XYZ points with RGB values. Unlike conventional workflows that clean or correct the scan, Wedge deliberately preserves drift, occlusion, glare, and compression artifacts. These “errors” are parsed by a custom VDB-based procedural model and reconstructed as a porous volumetric geometry in which confidence scores and color vectors regulate voxel thickness. Stable areas accrete; gaps, motion blur, and spectral distortions erode; errors become physical structure.

This formal strategy underpins a broader inquiry into how digital mediation calibrates perception. The façade is not presented as a static surface but as an ontological threshold where object and image, signal and noise, and digital and physical environments continuously interfere. The work extends research into “micro-tuning” perception — an idea developed through Wedge’s ongoing experiments with LiDAR, computational design, and machine learning.

At The Black Shop, the instability of the dataset becomes perceptible: approaching the façade from different angles reveals alternating conditions of clarity and blur; pausing versus moving changes how volume and edge are understood; reflection and shadow behave like a live feedback loop between the street and the scan that generated it.

Rather than asking viewers to passively look, the installation invites them to actively calibrate how they perceive. As Sir Peter Cook commented during his visit, “This brings Ron Arad to mind — a jolly, brave attempt by you and your colleagues to negotiate between technology and design.”

Materially, the façade is realized through binder jetting in recyclable quartz silica sand. The grain of a pixel becomes the grain of a print; finite resolution is sedimented as matter. Each component is designed for disassembly, re-crushing, and re-printing, enabling the project to evolve with subsequent scans of the site. This circular workflow — data → volume → matter → data — means the façade can be updated as the street changes, and the material can be recirculated with minimal waste. In this way, The Black Shop operates as a public experiment in sustainable fabrication as much as it is an aesthetic proposition for the future.