John Ochsendorf wants to tear down Rome’s iconic Pantheon. He wants to pull apart its 2000-year-old walls until it’s gorgeous dome collapses. Destroying it, he believes, is the best way to preserve it.

But the Pantheon that Ochsendorf, a professor of engineering and architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has in mind to destroy is less than 50 cm high, and it’s made of 492 3D-printed blocks. It’s designed from laser scans of the real building. A gaggle of MIT engineering students will place it on a table with a sliding base and pull the walls apart, then put it back together and tilt it until it crumbles.

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