COS explores 3D printing at Milan Design Week

Text by Janice Seow

Since 2012, fashion brand COS has made its presence felt at Milan’s Salone del Mobile with instagram-worthy installations done in collaboration with design’s biggest names (Nendo, Snarkitecture and Sou Fujimoto, to name a few).

This year, COS returns to the Salone with Conifera, a large-scale architectural installation that’s made from renewable resources using 3D printing technology.

Located at Palazzo Isimbardi, and done by London-based French architect Arthur Mamou-Mani and his eponymous studio, Conifera is digitally designed and fabricated using innovative 3D printing methods. It’s made of seven hundred interlocking modular bio-bricks, where wood and bioplastic composite lattices create a sculptural pathway leading from Palazzo Isimbardi’s central courtyard to its garden.

Mamou-Mani explains: “Conifera blends the digital with the physical world while addressing sustainability through the use of compostable bio-plastic, produced and 3D printed locally. It is a dialogue between technology and craft, between manmade and the natural, and between monumentality and lightness.” The architect describes the installation as “futuristic high-tech” but also “deeply poetic and human”.

As visitors journey through the installation, the scene shifts as the architecture of wood and bioplastic composite in the courtyard changes into a translucent and white bioplastic one in the palazzo’s garden, communicating a digitally fabricated bridge between the manmade and the natural world.

Conifera can be viewed from 9 – 14 April 2019 at Palazzo Isimbardi, Corso Monforte 35, 20122 Milan.

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