---
title: "Artist Filippo Nassetti’s latest 3D printed work visualizes breath"
url: https://www.voxelmatters.com/artist-filippo-nassettis-latest-3d-printed-work-visualizes-breath/
date: 2025-04-21
modified: 2025-04-21
lang: en
author: "Tess Boissonneault"
description: "Filippo Nassetti, a multimedia artist with a background in architecture, has for years been interested in exploring the intersection and relationship between the digital and physical and the natural and..."
categories:
  - "Architecture"
  - "Art"
  - "Design"
tags:
  - "future"
image: https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/breathing-architecture-2-640x427.jpeg
word_count: 456
---

# Artist Filippo Nassetti’s latest 3D printed work visualizes breath

Filippo Nassetti, a multimedia artist with a background in architecture, has for years been interested in exploring the intersection and relationship between the digital and physical and the natural and artificial. This investigation is continued in his latest work, Breathing Architecture II (2025), in which he has created a physical sculpture representing airflow in lungs using scientific data and 3D printing.

The impressive piece, measuring 45 x 26 x 31 cm, is based on a scientific dataset from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center that visualizes the passage of air through alveolar tissue in the lungs. This project actually builds on Breathing Architecture (2024), where the artist worked with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center through the S+T+ARTS AIR Residencies program to create a digital model of airflow in the lungs. According to the artist, this "led to a new, procedural method to accurately simulate airflow and particle deposition in alveolar tissue."

[![Breathing Architecture II by Artist Filippo Nassetti](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/breathing-architecture-1.jpeg)](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/breathing-architecture-1.jpeg)

In Breathing Architecture II, the intricate models are made into a physical reality using SLS 3D printing and Nylon material. Each fine branch of the complex structure (measuring as thin as 1.6 mm) follows the path of an air particle in the lungs, resulting in a captivating and beautiful piece of sculpture. Ultimately though, the project was about more than creating something beautiful.

As Nassetti writes on his [website](https://filipponassetti.com/breathing-architecture): "Breathing Architecture began with the idea that an artist’s perspective can help solve challenges in simulating complex biological systems. While scientists use equations and mechanical physics, an artist may see the body as a spatial architecture—structures to navigate through high resolution simulations, revealing their beauty and complexity. This fusion of analytical thinking and visual imagination offers a new approach to simulate anatomical systems."

[![Breathing Architecture II by Artist Filippo Nassetti](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/breathing-architecture-3.jpg)](https://www.voxelmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/breathing-architecture-3.jpg)

Indeed, the digital models created through the framework of the Breathing Architecture and Breathing Architecture II projects could play a role in simulating how diseases progress in the lungs. In fact, the simulation modeling research involved in the project is reportedly being used in the modeling of tuberculosis in an ongoing research project that was presented at the 35th Parallel CFD International Conference in 2024.

This is not the first project in which Nassetti has turned to 3D printing to create a physical artwork. In 2018, [MHOX](https://www.3dprintingbusiness.directory/company/mhox/), a design research group founded by Nassetti and Alessandro Zomparelli, created the [Superabundance Mask](https://www.voxelmatters.com/mhox-human-digital-generative-design-masks/) using AM and generative design. This mask is evocative of a fibrous tissue that covers the wearer's face almost entirely, creating a "a vision of the human body as substratum for the formation of a fibrous biodigital entity." In 2021, Nassetti deepened the exploration of the human face with the [Postnatural Head](https://www.voxelmatters.com/filippo-nassettis-postnatural-head-looks-at-erosion-of-human-features/), a 3D printed sculpture that explores the human head as a "geological entity of hard material that is eroded by forces over eons".