Anti-Ruin

A three-metre gate made of marble dust. Anti-Ruin was printed in fourteen elements from the fines of the Lasa marble quarry in South Tyrol, a by-product the quarry produces in almost the same volume as the stone it sells, and assembled in the Pavilion of Türkiye at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale.

Designed by OZRUH, the structure reverses the logic of a ruin: it starts as fragments and is meant to grow, come apart and be recombined. A free-standing column and an off-centre support carry a spanning slab. The elements are hollow shells, 6 to 8 cm thick, printed without moulds or formwork and placed on each other with dry joints and no mortar, so the structure can be taken down and rebuilt in another configuration. Each element weighs about 300 kg; together they amount to roughly 2,000 litres of printed stone, produced in four weeks. A documentary on the project, from quarry to print bed, was shown in the Biennale’s main exhibition, Intelligens.