Hasta La Ideas

“You can tell a lot about a society by whom it chooses to celebrate.” —Woody Allen

When we heard that Belgian gallery Z33 was holding a “sustainability summer school” during this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, we were interested in finding out more about these New Heroes. Thomas Lommée’s OpenStructures project is one of five-presentations from the New Times New Heroes show. A global dialogue four years in the making, the Project has steadily grown to encompass a variety of parts and objects all scaled according to an open-source grid system. We sat down with Lommée to learn more about the origins of the OpenStructures project, chat about learnings from the beta model and hear more about new models for adaptivity.

New Times New Heroes
April 12-17
Privata Oslavia 8, Ventura Lambrate
Milan

Core77: So, what sparked the start of the OpenStructures project in 2007?

Thomas Lommée: The OpenStructures project was a personal project that started with a sketch at the Institute Without Boundaries, in Toronto. I was looking for a more sustainable way of building, constructing and designing. On one hand, modularity is one of the core principles of sustainable design because it allows for flexibility in your design. It allows for objects to shrink and to grow and to adapt. And then on the other hand, there’s this development of open source thinking and open source development within software, which allows for people to build further on other people’s designs.

And then there was a third development which was laser [cutting] and 3D printing. It allowed for people to design and build at home. And then Sketch Up was coming out, which is a very accessible 3D software. These four trends merged into the OpenStructures project. How can we make objects that are easy to adapt, grow and shrink, and that also the consumer can build further on, repair and fill in. It was basically about generating a new relationship between the consumer or the end-user and the computer.

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