Hotmunculus

Design + Fabrication

Collaborators: Alexia Asgari, Oliva Champ Tremml

Harvard GSD Neural Bodies Studio led by Andrew Witt

Hotmunculus reimagines the body not as an occupant of space, but as a generator of it.

Cortical maps of human sensory and motor function reveal dramatic distortions of the human figure, where hands, lips, and tongue disproportionately magnify within the brain’s topology. We embrace these irregularities as a foundation for architectural form. Comfort zones exist 6 inches from the skin, so why control the conditions of vacuous space far from the body? By layering thermal sensitivity, tactile resolution, and motor scaling data, we construct absurd prosthetics of comfort: sculptural skins which contour not to the body’s appearance, but to its intimate gradients of sensation, vulnerability, and calibration.