SMArchitecture

By on April 25th, 2010 in Design, Ideas

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We ran across a very interesting operation: SMArchitecture, a “Kuwait and London based architectural & design R&D practice”. Their blog, written by Dr. Thomas Modeen describes their design experiments, which are often highly unusual and seem to have evolved from fabrication techniques. Some examples:
 
The ‘Comet’ vase, which consists of a bundle of hollow, extruded tear-drop shaped, funnels vertically staggered so that only three of the pointed base-tips touch the ground (forming thus a tripod stand). 
 
The Alice Cup: The core cup was designed in Rhino (software), made roughly the size of a 1.5 decilitre teacup, which was saved as a STL file, and consequently manipulated to befit a number of defined functions, such as an espresso cup (shrunk), café latte cup (stretched vertically) and a cream pitcher (stretched horizontally). It was also made into a saucer (horizontally flattened and stretched), as well as a pitcher (scaled up, stretched vertically and slightly flattened). 
 
The Fragrant Time Clock, which: uses smell as the medium through which time can be told. The core premise is straightforward – take an incense-stick that burns at a regular speed, test and measure out the correlation between the length and speed at which it burns (i.e. how long a stretch of the stick is needed for, say, a ten minute burn?) and segment a select number of such incense fragrances into consecutive sequences and lengths according to preference.
 
These ideas are truly fascinating explorations of life-fabrication mashups that you can’t miss. 
 

By Kerry Stevenson

Kerry Stevenson, aka "General Fabb" has written over 8,000 stories on 3D printing at Fabbaloo since he launched the venture in 2007, with an intention to promote and grow the incredible technology of 3D printing across the world. So far, it seems to be working!

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