Translating Design Language into Fabricated Form: A Style-Oriented Framework for Desktop Additive Manufacturing of Twentieth-Century Interiors

Digital fabrication technologies increasingly enable designers and researchers to reinterpret historical design languages through contemporary production methods. Within this context, desktop 3D printing offers an accessible yet constrained medium for translating stylistically rich interior design objects into tangible form. This study examines how distinct twentieth-century interior design movements—Art Deco, Bauhaus, and Mid-century Modern—are mediated through desktop additive manufacturing, focusing on the preservation of formal identity rather than manufacturing performance. Representative interior objects were digitally reconstructed from archival and reference material and fabricated under standardized desktop 3D printing conditions. The investigation adopts a style-oriented evaluation framework that examines silhouette continuity, characteristic geometric features, ornamental legibility, and structural–stylistic coherence. To support comparative interpretation, a Style Preservation Index (SPI) is introduced as a structured design evaluation tool that makes stylistic assessment explicit and repeatable without reducing it to purely geometric metrics. The results demonstrate that stylistic legibility is preserved to differing degrees depending on the formal vocabulary of each design movement, with minimal and geometrically rational styles exhibiting higher compatibility with layer-based fabrication than ornamentally dense or materially expressive designs. Rather than framing these differences as technological limitations, the study interprets them as insights into how design languages interact with fabrication constraints. By positioning desktop additive manufacturing as a medium of design translation rather than replication, this work contributes a reproducible framework for design research, heritage interpretation, and education, offering a structured approach for exploring how historical styles can be re-engaged through contemporary digital fabrication.