By Suzanne Vanderhoef

In the inner courtyard of the historic Wainwright building in downtown St. Louis is a sculpture called Flora Field that, at first glance, looks like an intricate, filagree terracotta wall. But the clay used to create it was actually made with a 3D printer.

When you typically think of 3-D printing, it’s with plastic filament that can be run with a desktop-sized printer. But Kelley Van Dyck, Assistant Professor of Architecture at Washington University and the artist behind Flora Field used a much larger machine called a Potterbot. Each print is made of multiple intersecting parts with lines of clay that were pre-programmed in to create each tile.

Flora Field is part of the Insight STL design competition, which asked artists to propose a project that could bring new ways of seeing downtown St. Louis. Van Dyck said she wanted to use the terracotta and ornament and reference the Wainwright building. In fact, she said in architecture school it’s one of the first buildings that you study and its architect, Louis Henry Sullivan, is often referred to as the father of the modern skyscraper.

“I loved the story of bricks in St. Louis, and all of the beautiful ornamental details,” explained Van Dyck. “And so that was something I was really interested in trying with the ceramic printing: making my own bricks and looking at how we could use the digital tools to think about new ways of making or designing ornament on the, on the bricks.”

Each “brick” in the sculpture is about 10 by 10 inches and has a small notch in the side so the individual tiles could be connected by sliding together along metal poles Van Dyck compared to playing the game Connect Four.

“In the end, it’s made me sort of rethink the idea about precision and architecture and how we can kind of think about having a more loose fit, or not be so fixated on everything fitting perfectly,” she said. “So it’s a way to sort of reframe how we might think about sort of the, you know, super precision that’s often thought of architecture.”