Colossal Biosciences
Public and private commissions • Design • Manufacture • Art sculpture and installations •
Life replicas and dummies
• Robotics and animatronics
Colossal Biosciences
Public and private commissions • Design • Manufacture • Art sculpture and installations •
Life replicas and dummies
• Robotics and animatronics
Image courtesy of Colossal
At the new headquarters of Colossal Biosciences, visitors step into a world where extinction meets possibility
For the new headquarters of Texas-based biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences, we had the pleasure of working with co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm to create two dynamic installations, each one a reflection of the company’s endeavour to restore extinct species through science, technology and conservation, and an emotional anchor to recovery and possibility.
As visitors enter the Colossal lobby, they encounter a mammal of immense proportions: a juvenile woolly mammoth, roughly three metres tall, encased in simulated ice as if preserved in the tundra. In the waiting room, looking out across the lobby to the purpose-built laboratory, an animatronic dire wolf stands on a jagged rocky outcrop.
To create the woolly mammoth display, we digitally sculpted the young mammal’s body and custom-made its 30-centimetre-long fur, applying each strand by hand. Yet when we began making this young mammal, we started not with its body or its hair, but with its ice.
We needed to achieve something akin to the beautiful refraction-effect of this frozen substance, so we began with some simple tests using carved acrylic sheets — a material that would replicate ice’s crystalline structure, its density and its lightness. We then scaled this up, building a fifth-scale model (about the size of an aquarium) before starting on the life-sized giant.
Measuring roughly three metres tall and four-and-a-half metres wide, a block of ice this size would have weighed over 13 tonnes. To dramatically reduce its weight, we sourced the largest, thickest sheets of acrylic we could find across New Zealand, then glued roughly one-and-a-half tonnes of acrylic together before carefully sculpting the texture of the ice by hand. We carved in ripples, a sea of fissures and swells, slowly crafting a crystalline structure that would mimic the delicate refraction of ice. Roughly 5,000 hours was then spent on polishing.
In Colossal’s waiting room, an animatronic dire wolf, made with thick white fur and a highly articulate neck, moves and “breathes” and wags its tail, activated by a motion sensor as visitors pass. The skeletal design of this apex predator — which, compared to modern-day gray wolves, had thicker legs, wider heads and a more robust musculature — was sculpted to the exact measurements of the dire wolves Colossal de-extincted.
With hundreds of individual lights flowing across the six-metre-wide, four-and-a-half-metre-tall installation, the dire wolf is designed to link visitors to what was lost with the scientific tools now used to recover DNA, study traits and work toward restoration in Colossal's laboratories.
Hero image courtesy of Colossal.
At the new headquarters of Colossal Biosciences, visitors step into a world where extinction meets possibility
For the new headquarters of Texas-based biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences, we had the pleasure of working with co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm to create two dynamic installations, each one a reflection of the company’s endeavour to restore extinct species through science, technology and conservation, and an emotional anchor to recovery and possibility.
As visitors enter the Colossal lobby, they encounter a mammal of immense proportions: a juvenile woolly mammoth, roughly three metres tall, encased in simulated ice as if preserved in the tundra. In the waiting room, looking out across the lobby to the purpose-built laboratory, an animatronic dire wolf stands on a jagged rocky outcrop.
To create the woolly mammoth display, we digitally sculpted the young mammal’s body and custom-made its 30-centimetre-long fur, applying each strand by hand. Yet when we began making this young mammal, we started not with its body or its hair, but with its ice.
We needed to achieve something akin to the beautiful refraction-effect of this frozen substance, so we began with some simple tests using carved acrylic sheets — a material that would replicate ice’s crystalline structure, its density and its lightness. We then scaled this up, building a fifth-scale model (about the size of an aquarium) before starting on the life-sized giant.
Measuring roughly three metres tall and four-and-a-half metres wide, a block of ice this size would have weighed over 13 tonnes. To dramatically reduce its weight, we sourced the largest, thickest sheets of acrylic we could find across New Zealand, then glued roughly one-and-a-half tonnes of acrylic together before carefully sculpting the texture of the ice by hand. We carved in ripples, a sea of fissures and swells, slowly crafting a crystalline structure that would mimic the delicate refraction of ice. Roughly 5,000 hours was then spent on polishing.
In Colossal’s waiting room, an animatronic dire wolf, made with thick white fur and a highly articulate neck, moves and “breathes” and wags its tail, activated by a motion sensor as visitors pass. The skeletal design of this apex predator — which, compared to modern-day gray wolves, had thicker legs, wider heads and a more robust musculature — was sculpted to the exact measurements of the dire wolves Colossal de-extincted.
With hundreds of individual lights flowing across the six-metre-wide, four-and-a-half-metre-tall installation, the dire wolf is designed to link visitors to what was lost with the scientific tools now used to recover DNA, study traits and work toward restoration in Colossal’s laboratories.
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