From the aerospace industry to medical applications, the Belgium-based 3D printing service bureau Materialise has helped to jump-start numerous innovative projects across the world. But now, the company is turning their attention back towards their home country, teaming up with the locally design studio Unfold to present the Skafaldo project at this year’s Milan Design Week. The project will be a major part of the Belgium Matters exhibition that is being hosted by the international contemporary culture magazine DAMN° at Palazzo Litta. The exhibition, which will open next week, will feature a total of 13 collaborating designers and companies based around Belgium.
For the Skafaldo project, Unfold decided to utilize Materialise’s eStage software in an extremely unique way. The software is especially useful for automatically generating support structures for SLA prints, creating lightweight, geometric structures to hold up the actual object during the print process. But instead of doing what most would do, which is discarding these support structures in the trash, Unfold instead decided to use the support as in an innovative and artistic way. In order to accomplish this, the team sent basic shapes through the eStage software, took the printed support structures from these objects, and then had them casted in bronze by Factum Arte.
“It was interesting for us to ‘design’ with the eStage software which tunes into our fascination for processes where you ride on the edge of control,” the Unfold team stated.
In fact, these basic shapes were never even printed; instead, the Unfold team decided to recreate the 3D design of the bowl and side-table with more traditional methods, such as glass blowing (at Ajeto Glassworks) and CNC wood milling (by Modelmakerij Van Gerwen). Inspired by an aesthetic mixture of utilitarian and neo-gothic industrial architecture, as well as the work of Bernd & Hilla Becher, Unfold ultimately realized that these support structures could be the most distinct feature of the bowl and side-table display.
The entirety of the Belgium Matters exhibition will be held in Palazzo Litta, and will be grouped under the event entitled “A Matter of Perception: Tradition & Technology”. After the Press Preview, which takes place on Monday, April 11, Belgium Matters will be open to the public on a daily basis from 11AM-9PM. Thanks to Materialise’s support-driven eStage software, the Unfold team was able to take a unique approach for their latest piece, which is sure to have more people looking at the complexly geometrical support base more than the actual bowl or side-table. If you’re around at Milan Design Week 2016, you should definitely stop by and support these support-based pieces!
