A chocolate workshop and museum propose the 'fourth stage of simulacra', transforming York's confectionery history into sweet simulacra.

Challenging Baudrillard's view that the hyperreality of digitalisation loses its original meaning, the building creates an architectural hybrid of digital fabrication and analogue crafting, bringing back the driving force of desire.

The procession of simulacra is embedded architecturally through a series of digitally crafted fragments of shifting scales. The simulated toolpath generates glitches both in the roofscape and the underground workshop, leaving traces of the crafting process on the stock surface. The mould-making site is constantly reconstructed with subtractive manufacturing technologies, simulating York’s stone quarries. The fragments of façade, workshop wall and show windows are constructed on site, shifting between horizontal and vertical, digital and analogue, physical and metaphorical.

Drawing a parallel between the construction and confectionery industry, the miniaturisation of the building ultimately denatures and precedes the original, leaving ‘sweet simulacra’ of the confectionery future for the city of York.