Joris Laarman / the Netherlands

the Netherlands born 1979

Joris Laarman’s work provides insight into the shifting nature of design and manufacturing, revealing that we are at the point of a dramatic transition from large-scale twentieth-century industrial manufacturing to a new twenty-first-century paradigm of small-scale and decentralised digital fabrication.

Bridge table, 2010, is an aluminium and tungsten carbide dining table whose form is based on the properties of bones and trees. The table was designed using software that translates information drawn from nature into instructions for robots, tools and 3D printers. The table is a highlight of Laarman’s practice created using a new fabrication technology named High Velocity Oxygen Fuel (HVOF) coating that prevents wearing and corrosion. The aluminium table is spray-coated in tungsten carbide. The surface is then repeatedly ground back and polished over many days to produce a reflective tabletop of exceptional hardness.

Dragon bench, 2014, was produced using a MX3D printer, a custom 3D printer created by Joris Laarman Lab that prints objects with molten stainless steel delivered by a robot. This groundbreaking system allows Laarman to draw metal lines in space, and for these lines to form complex shapes that are strong and resilient. The shape of the bench is created from mathematical instructions and computer codes that regenerate and evolve over time, meaning the design of each work is unique. Dragon bench, 2014 is the first large-scale design work by Laarman to be 3D printed in self-supporting lines of metal.

As affordable computer-controlled machines, smart software and new materials become more common, digital fabrication has developed from being a tool for prototyping to a way of manufacturing actual products. Laarman’s Maker chair, 2014, explores this space by offering a chair composed of digitally fabricated 3D parts that fit together exactly, like a three-dimensional puzzle. By fractioning designs into many small parts, small consumer 3D printers and computer numerical control milling machines can produce the building blocks for larger objects, revealing a future where large-scale construction could be achieved through open source systems sharing building blocks and parts of products printed on demand.

Joris Laarman believes that in a few years every city will have professional production workshops as well as fabrication hubs for DIY makers. In the tradition of DIY designs, where designers would create manuals of their designs so that people could replicate their work at low cost, the design file for Laarman’s 3D-printable Maker chairs, 2014, were made available on the internet under a creative commons license for people to download, modify and manufacture themselves. By offering an open source design to the world in this way, Laarman questions how long the familiar retail model, where we buy things in shops, will survive.

Representing Joris Laarman’s exploration of 3D-printed furniture, the Microstructures, aluminium gradient chair, 2014, is printed in aluminium using a computer algorithm which modifies the material’s printed cellular structure, thickness, density and pattern according to the structural requirements of the chair. Similar to the cellular structure of bones and plants, at times when strength is required the cells that make up the chair tighten to become solid metal, and at other times open up to reduce the chair’s weight. Using geometry in this way allows Laarman to harness the technology of 3D printing to optimise the structures of objects according to their function.

For the NGV Triennial Joris Laarman and Telart have developed an animated timeline revealing the increasing pace of industrial and technological evolution. The timeline maps key points in the industrial and digital ages while speculating on the trajectory of technology, human population, the climate and computing power, providing a glimpse of what has come to pass, and predicting what the future might look like.

BIO

In 2004 Laarman, together with his partner and filmmaker Anita Star, founded a lab in Amsterdam to collaborate with craftspeople, scientists and software engineers. Laarman is interested in how technology can transform design, and uses emerging technology to develop futuristic objects and design processes.

A guiding question for Joris Laarman is whether robots take over all of our work, or will digital fabrication usher in a new era in which craftsmanship, enabled by technology, regains a central position in society. Through his research and design, Joris Laarman investigates these issues while demonstrating that we are on the cusp of great change.

Laarman’s designs are held in the permanent collections and exhibitions in such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris.