Opening of a 3D printed stainless steel bridge in Amsterdam

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Queen Maxima of the Netherlands recently pressed a button to start a robotic arm equipped with scissors to cut ribbon, opening a new bridge in Amsterdam’s red light district. The six-year-long bridge is designed by Joris Laarman, designed by Arup and built by MX3D. It was 3D printed from nearly 10,000 pounds of stainless steel in a process that took nearly six months using four robots spitting out 685 miles of molten wire.

Architecture professor Philip Oldfield calculates that the bridge is responsible for 30.5 tonnes (27.7 tonnes) of initial carbon. He probably underestimates it, considering that four robots with arc welders for heads ran for six months, remelting and then depositing the stainless steel balls. Others complain, “We really don’t get it as a species, do we? It should have been a wooden bridge with virtually no carbon footprint and also storing carbon.” Architect Elrond Burrell says, as Treehugger has said many times, that “3D printing remains a solution in search of a problem to be solved”.

This raises the question we are often asked:

Why is it on Treehugger?

Lloyd alter


To answer that, we have to go back to October 2017, when we first heard about Joris Laarman and the Cooper Hewitt Bridge in New York City and wrote, “Joris Laarman Lab shows the future of digital designâ€. Laarman is an artist and wrote: “When people see a robot, they see a solution to a problem or even the problem itself. I see an instrument for creating intelligent beauty.”

“We are the children of a period of transition: one foot in the industrial age and the other in the digital age… Will robots resume all our work within ten years? Or will developments in digital manufacturing ensure that craftsmanship and the love of the way things are made will once again be at the center of society? Either way, we are on the verge of big changes. ”

As the beginning of the video shows, the bridge was believed to have been built on site with two robots working at each end. It was built in a factory by MX3D, a company co-founded by Laarman, completed in 2018, and is waiting for the canal walls to be reinforced to be able to support it.

MX3D is not only in the field of bridges; they have a vision of MX3D robots building “light constructions such as bridges or complete buildings, optimized personalized vessels or even Martian colonies in complete autonomy”. It sounds fantastic, but Laarman then started with chairs and made it to the bridges.

MX3D


The bridge is a lot of things. Laarman is an artist at heart, concerned about the future of arts and crafts in a digital world, writing in 2017: “We believe that a hybrid form of digital manufacturing and local craftsmanship is the future. of a more democratic design world, and with the help of new technologies, we hope that in a few years, everyone can afford a good design made locally. ”

I wrote at the time, using this famous phrase:

“So why is this on TreeHugger?” About a decade ago, we started looking at the implications of what we called downloadable design, envisioning a time when “we’ll download design on demand. It’s like the music on our iPod – dematerialized bits and bytes pulled back where we need them, without the waste of a physical middleman. , it was mostly hype; design is difficult. Joris Laarman Laboratory shows that, in the hands of real artists, these technologies are changing design, changing the way things are done and creating wonderful opportunities. ”


Robot on the Moon.

MX3D


Philp Oldfield and the other skeptics are probably right; we don’t need 3d printed stainless steel bridges. We probably don’t need 3D printed domes on the moon. But we need Laarman.


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