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Design by  Kapsoola ·

I’m a sucker for strong contrast, a sucker for bold typography… so I really enjoy this. The only problem that I have with this brand is the coffee packaging, I really wish they hadn’t gone with gloss. Throws things off, in my honest opinion :)

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The ULTIMATE halloween costume for designers. What we fear MOST.

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Joris Larrman’s Canal Bridge in Amsterdam could take 3D printing ‘to a higher level”

There lies a world’s first 3D-printed bridge in Amsterdam, which uses a technique that designer Joris Larrman said would soon be adopted when building ‘infinitely large structures’

The pedestrian bridge that is going to be located on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal in the Dutch city’s red light district is being printed in steel by six-axis robots, which will ‘draw’ the structure in the air.

Laarman told Dezeen that the project could usher in a new era of digital manufacturing- “Everyone is talking about 3D printing but not so much is actually possible yet,” Laarman said. “We are trying to lift the world of digital fabrication to a higher level.”

The bridge is 8 meters long and 4 meters wide. It is printed in one piece in a former shipbuilding hangar in the Amsterdam’s NDSM shipyard and then transported to the city centre. The whole work is to be started next summer and the completion is not expected before 2017. 

The Dutch designer launched a new company called MX3D to develop the technology used to build the bridge. This involves programming robotic arms to control welding machines. The robots will build the structure by forming struts out of thousands of precisely placed blobs of molten steel. Such a technique can also be used to print with other metals such as copper or aluminium.

Salome Galijaard is a senior designer and project leader at Arup. He said the project represented a really big step for 3D printing of structures at an architectural scale.  

QUOTE: A robot is a very old machine actually. It’s made to do one thing again and again, one movement. It’s made to pick and place. But by using smart software we can make it move any way we want; it doesn’t have to be a repetitive movement. It can do really complex movements and it’s able to communicate in real time with the welding machine. That’s what makes it possible.-- Joris Laarman