London, England (CNN) -- It looks like an architectural fantasy from a world far in the future, but Michael Hansmeyer's complex column design is so real you can touch it.
His work is composed of sixteen million faces and made from 2,700 layers of cardboard. It is the result of a cutting-edge computational process and people's responses to it are just as improbable.
Some people say it looks like a reptile, some people think it looks like an underwater creature and other people bring up the Gothic, said Hansmeyer, an architect and computer scientist based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
The incredible complexity of the column's fractal surface is the product of what is known as a subdivision algorithm, a process that used a computer program to divide and sub-divide the the facets of a classical Doric column.
To make the design reality, laser cutters sliced the design out of 2,700 individual layers of 1mm-thick cardboard sheets. The layers were then stacked around a load-bearing core to produce a 2.7 meter-high prototype.
This school of design is broadly termed computational architecture -- architectural models generated by a computer program.
For me, it's about expanding the language of design, expanding what kinds of forms one can produce and what kinds of systems of ornament one can generate, Hansmeyer said.
He is busy creating a forest of similar Gothic-style columns. These are being produced in a similar way to the cardboard original, only this time out of more durable plastic, with plans for them to be installed out of doors.
Beyond it, the idea is to generate architecture, inhabitable space or some definition of a space, he continued, adding that next on his to-do list might be either a vault or an arch.
Computational architecture is increasingly important in architectural practice. You'd be hard-pressed to find young architects that aren't designing on computers, said Ari Kardasis, a graduate researcher in computation and design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The traditional notion of an architect having a vision of a building and then drawing it either on paper or on a computer and then constructing it isn't really how architecture works and in reality the computer has a lot of influence on design, he added.
With computers becoming ever more sophisticated, it may not be long before Hansmeyer is able to build an entire cathedral.
