London architect Daniel Widrig has collaborated with fashion designer Iris van Herpen and digital manufacturers .MGX by Materialise to create a collection of digitally printed clothing.

Called Escapism, the project is a development of an earlier collaboration between the designers (see our earlier story), to make more lightweight and flexible 3D printed dresses.

The collection was presented at Paris Fashion Week.

Photographs are by Michel Zoeter.

Above: headdress is by Stephen Jones

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Above: shoes are by United Nude

The following information is from Widrig:

Escapism is a continuation of the collaboration between London based architect Daniel Widrig and dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen.

The project started with Crystallization, the first fashion collection ever featuring 3d printed dresses. Crystallization was launched at the Amsterdam Fashion Week in 2010.

Escapism attempted to further investigate possibilities and potentiality of advanced digital design techniques and computer aided manufacturing in the realm of haute couture fashion design.

Above: shoes are by United Nude

Based on earlier experiences made with digitally manufactured dresses, Escapism pushes the limits of 3D printing in order to increase the wearability of the pieces.

The dresses are composed of clusters of fiber-like elements with minimized diameters. The fineness of the printed lines of the fabric makes the overall objects lightweight, flexible and allows for an economic production.

Above: shoes are by United Nude

The geometric concept further allowed the designers to create larger objects without comprimising wearability and the model’s mobility on the catwalk.

The collection was produced in collaboration with New York based label .MGX by Materialise via selective laser sintering (SLS) in Polyamide.
Escapism was first presented at the Paris Fashion Week earlier this year.

See also:

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Crystallization by Iris van Herpen and Daniel Widrig	Snake&Molting legwear by Camille Cortet	Shell by Julia Krantz

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and .MGX by Materialise appeared first on Dezeen.

Fashion designer Iris van Herpen collaborated with New York company .MGX by Materialise and artist Daniel Widrig to create 3D printed clothes.

Created as part of her Spring/Summer 2010 collection called Crystallization, the designs were inspired by the transformation of liquid into crystals.

The piece was unveiled as a preview at Amsterdam International Fashion Week last month and is the first of three pieces to be shown at London Fashion Week in September.

Above: shoes are by Iris van Herpen X United Nude

Here's some more information from van Herpen:

Iris van Herpen will be showing a 10-piece preview of her SS11 collection ‘Crystallization’ at the Opening Soiree of the Amsterdam International Fashion Week. This preview is an unique opportunity to get a glimpse of her entire collection, which will be showed in September at the London Fashion Week.

In the transformat

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and .MGX by Materialise appeared first on Dezeen.

London designer Daniel Widrig has created a wooden chair with three legs that morph into armrests and a back.

Called Brazil, the design is broken down into components to be CNC-cut from laminated wood.

Here's some more information from Widrig:

‘Brazil’, a limited-edition armchair designed by Daniel Widrig was launched at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin last month. Featuring a structural bifurcation system, the chair has three legs that branch out from the floor and smoothly transform into armrests, a backrest and a seating surfaces in one fluid movement.

Form-Finding

The chair has been digitally prototyped, structurally and ergonomically tested and optimized through digital dynamics simulation as used in the aerospace, automotive, and biomechanics industries. This process allowed for a fast and flexible design development and a straight-forward realization of the complex geometry of the piece.

Construction

The chair is built from laminated wood sheets via a 5-axis CNC router. To save materials and production time, its geometry is split into multiple components that are digitally nested onto sheets of laminated wood and CNC machined. The component are then assembled, glued and hand finished. Through the CNC milling, the layered structure of the laminated wood is exposed and underlines the topography of the chair’s surface.

The prototyping and engineering process of the chair was a close collaboration with Filippo Moroni of the Italian company Monolito.

See also:

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Vegetal by the Bouroullec brothers	Bone Armchair by Joris Laarman	More furniture stories

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Urban Lobby is a research project by architects MRGD, that combines infrastructure and architecture for a speculative redevelopment of the Centre Point office tower in central London.

MRGD is a collaboration of young architects Melike Altinisik, Samer Chaumoun and Daniel Widrig.

The project uses Centre Point as a testing ground for their computational tools and design techniques.

Here's some info from MRGD:

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Project brief

According to Christopher Alexander, compartmentalization and the dissociation of internal elements are potential signs of anarchy and schizophrenia. Fuzzy logic thinking is another step of helping human thought to recognize our environment less as a world of crisp boundaries and disconnections and more as a field of swarming agents with blurred borders.

EMERGED is investigating the potential of fuzzy logic as a loose-fit organizational technique for developing intelligent, flexible and adaptive environments. Seeing the project as a testing ground for its computational tools and design techniques, the team expands its research territory from focusing and systemizing the dynamic hair tool as generative design machine to a larger scale, involving therefore levels of social, cultural and global organizations. The aim set by the team is to demonstrate a wide range of formal, spatial and programmatic organizations, exploring the ideas of form finding and self-organization.

The project will explore ways of producing architectural interventions based on an understanding of the city as a field of dynamics. The team’s primary concern will involve infrastructure as architecture and their impact on the selected confined site and its immediate adjacencies.

This urban lobby is thought to be a continually contested and negotiated transient space, a public living room, a private boardroom, an orientation space, a public and private open space, a subway business lounge, etc. The resultant possibility of lobby-ing is an investigation rooted in creative and critical speculations on how one addresses contemporary modes of urbanity and interfacing. This urban space is also a functional lobby for the sites various companies needing not only more interfaces with outside i.e.: subcontractors, collaborators, customers, consultants, but also an increase of general communication interfacing among partners, directors and employees.

Currently, Centrepoint, an iconic 70s high-rise building in the centre of London, is comprised of a very scattered amalgam of subway entries that link through tangled labyrinths to the subway lines. In addition the density of the urban commercial and retail fabric provides generative architectural opportunities as well as direct resistance for growth and connectivity.

The high pedestrian activity level of Tottenham Court Road and the convergence of millions of commuters at the current Tottenham Court Road transportation hub provide the site with an intricate connectivity problem.

The project carries the ideas of blurred boundaries, interplay and interaction into the building’s interior; different lobbies will be plugged in and distributed along Centrepoint office building’s facade: a scheme that will replace the earlier concept of Atrium and whose primary role is to speed vertical circulation and communication, establishing interim gathering places throughout the building.

Conclusion

The form builds up with the circulation logic based on the hair system’s algorithm, followed by a post production phase highlighting the primary arteries which become structural spines and secondary lines that become circulation paths. The form is complemented by a grid logic flowing and producing a secondary system highly driven into the primary. It’s a moment of primary and secondary logic modulated along with a skin layer involving additional subsystems fitting together.

This brings this up the discussion of beauty vs. elegance. Both are quite different concepts. One is either beautiful or not. Technique comes to play its major role to transform what is considered not beautiful to beautiful similar to plastic surgery. It allows us to push towards beauty by producing elegance. Elegance is therefore achieved as kind of problem solving process, an ability to articulate complexity, and multiple agendas into a resolution. It’s an elaborated condition whereas beauty is a lucky hit; elegance is a resolution of multiple agendas into complex articulated and resolved conditions.

The random production of using force in the hair systems experiments produced the first step of elegance, the use of logics , continuities and algorithms, laws for differentiation, were all part of the first step towards elegance. It really become virtuosity when we no longer use computers and technology but creatively solve the interpolation and inter-articulation into the organic domain a process that happens through evolution and trial and error and cross interpretation of subsystems all leading to production of elegance.

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Posted by Rose Etherington

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