In Milan, a design festival has created a pavilion made out of wood and bioplastic as its central installation.
Dubbed Conifera and designed by Arthur Mamou-Mani and Karin Gustafsson, the Milan Design Week Pavilion is made up of 700 interlocking, 3-D printed “biobricks” and can be taken apart and re-erected into a number of new structures.
“Conifera was a huge challenge,” Mamou-Mani tells Surface Mag. “We pushed everything possible in terms of material innovation and 3D printing capabilities. We had the right technology in the right moment.”
Mamou-Mani says it was challenging to get the 3D printing process to such a large scale and optimize the best pattern through the lattice. “Imagine someone holding a pen, trying to not lift their hand while finding the most optimal pathway through a zigzagging lattice,” he adds. “That’s the mathematical challenge: to maximize speed, minimize the amount of material, and discover an assembly process that makes sense. We iterated, started production, continued to iterate, arrived on site, continued to iterate, and so on.”
Gustafsson says he hopes to see PLA used in more prototyping, while Mamou-Mani adds that infrastructure, including roofs, partitions, flooring and furniture, can be produced using PLA.