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Never thought you’d be able to print an entire house from your computer? Well, think again: 3D printing has arrived!

The gunshot has been fired. The first-ever from a gun made on a 3D printer. Following eight months of development by 25-year-old Texas law student Cody Wilson, the world’s first gun made entirely from plastic has announced – rather loudly – that 3D printing is out of its starting blocks.

Within hours the US government voiced strong concerns regarding safety because plastic can’t be detected by security scanners. Cody uploaded a video and the blueprint for making your own gun on YouTube – two days and 100 000 downloads later, the State Department ordered him to take it down.

How does it work?

3D printers are similar to standard 2D printers, but with a crucial difference – they add a vertical dimension. They work by creating layers of material, mostly from nylon. Like the pixels in paper printing, the layers are tiny, measuring between 0,1 and 0,05 mm. The printer’s resolution determines the amount of detail it can give an object.

Industrial manufacturers have used the technology for more than 30 years to create prototypes, and in the 1990s aeronautical, medical and other precision-based industries picked up on it. British designer Ron Arad was the first to draw attention to the possibility that the technology could be used for production itself. The jewellery pieces he designed in 2000 were humourously called ‘Not Made by Hand, Not Made in China’.

Mini factory

The tipping point was in 2007 when the first RepRap self-assembled 3D printer (which could print its own parts!) made the idea of a personal 3D printer a reality.

There’s also the MakerBot, and you can order one for between R7 600 and R14 200. These models are pretty small and low-resolution, but 3D print shops like Shapeways want to make high resolution printers more widely available.

Question is, what would you actually produce? Up until now, the options have been frivolous – some designer lights, candlesticks, jewellery and studs for Nike soccer boots. Nokia recently released open-source files so people can print out customised cellphone cases for the Lumia 820.

Of more significance are the medical applications such as implants, bone replacements and prosthetics. Labs are also looking at printers that can print human tissue – and therefore body organs.

And then, of course, there are weapons. As Cody Wilson told Forbes magazine, ‘Anywhere there’s a computer and an Internet connection, there’s the promise of a gun. It’s scary, but that’s what we’re aiming to show.’

If there is some comfort, it is that the plastic gun still needs a metal bullet that is nowhere near being produced on a printer.

A printed house?

Even before the gun, three separate teams were in a race to complete the most ambitious 3D printing project to date – a house.

The Dutch company Universe Architecture is working on a two-storey sandstone house, to be printed on-site, while British architects Softkill Design are proposing a structure that can grow like bone and be printed in plastic sheets before being assembled.

But the Dutch firm DUS Architects is winning the race. They are already busy printing a Dutch canal house, room by room, with their shipping container-turned-3D printer. Called the KamerMaker (‘room maker’), the printer produces 3.5m sections at a time, which clip together with Lego-type joints and steel cables. According to the BBC, the front facade of the building will be completed by the end of the year, but it will be a while before the entire building is finished.

The plan is to have a fully furnished house, from the attic to cupboards in the bedrooms. The problem is money, since the project is experimental (in a tongue-in-cheek attempt to raise funds, DUS Architects are selling 3D printed champagne glasses on their website).

Universe Architecture’s ‘Landscape House’ is perhaps more commercially viable. It has asked Italian engineer Enrico Dini, who invented the world’s largest 3D printer, the D-shape, to help.

The D-shape is as big as a warehouse and uses a chemical reaction to convert sand into synthetic sandstone.

Enrico printed the first habitable structure – a 3m high pavilion – in 2009 and in 2010 he printed an unsophisticated one-room hut that included a sink, work surface and bed.

However, Dini and Universe Architecture’s Landscape House is not entirely 3D printed, as their competitors like to point out. The printer will produce a hollow 3D printed shell that will then be filled with concrete for reinforcement.

Softkill Design’s house looks like a bird’s nest, but it is a bold assertion of a new aesthetic for a new technology. Modelled on the fibrous structure of bone, Protohouse 2.0 is a chaos of plastic fibres, some as thin as 0.7mm, which completely challenges the limitations of steel-and-concrete buildings that require rectilinear beams.

Whether the 3D printing craze sparks a consumer revolution that sees us ordering plans from furniture suppliers and printing our own bookshelves and tables at home remains to be seen. For now, the technology remains out of reach for most and the number of domestic applications is limited.

Sharp thinking

Paris Fashion Week headlines this year all lauded Dutch designer Iris van Herpen for 3D printing her entire range. In Manhattan, burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese showed off a 3D printed dress designed by Michael Schmidt and generated by architect Francis Bitonti.

Back in Africa, urchin-inspired 3D printed spikes featured prominently in fashion designer Gert-Johan Coetzee’s spring/summer 2013 collection, left, launched at SA Fashion Week. With 3D printing, Gert-Johan says, “I could create lightweight, flexible pieces with spines as long as I wanted.” Although intended as a conceptual range, the provocative skewers popped the catwalk bubble when TV personality Jennifer Su appeared at the recent South African Music Awards in one of Gert-Johan’s spiky gowns.

3D photo booth

Japan always pushes technology beyond expectations, as with the world’s first 3D photo booth that was developed by Masashi Kawamura in Tokyo last year. Instead of cameras, 3D scanners capture the poser’s form, which is then miniaturised and produced on a 3D printer.

Design it yourself

3D technology is especially useful to young designers who want to be ahead of the curve.

Pretoria designer Michaella Janse van Vuuren first came across the technology when she did post-graduate research in electronic engineering about medical implants. It prickled her creativity, especially the complicated, tangled structures.

Her label, Nomili, and her first range of jewellery and decor items show her fascination with complex organic forms based on mathematical models. Lights from this range are available at MGX, a Belgian brand that focuses on 3D printed designs. You’ll find her new work, which includes mythical animal shapes, right, and intricate detail, in design galleries in New York and Dubai.

“My work is about experimentation and evolution, about art and science, and new materials and processes,” she says. “By means of 3D printing I have been able to give substance to my imagination, with no limit to realising even the most elaborate image.” 

Thoughts for the future

There are lots of questions about the ethics of 3D, just like there were questions about intellectual copyright during the digital music revolution. How will the designer prevent more print-outs of their work? What about combining products, like taking the spout of one teapot and the handle of another? How much of a product can you borrow before you have to pay? What about censorship of potentially damaging information, such as the design of a weapon?

These are the kind of questions that will be asked now that 3D printing is here. But it’s not a new challenge: with each advance in technology in science the possibility exists that the innovation can be abused. But with compromise, regulation and control, a working solution is possible. 

The Agents of the 3D Revolution is 9am to 5pm seminar organised by South African and UK designers, researchers and entrepreneurs to enlighten South Africans on what is happening at the cutting-edge of design for 3D printing. At the FADA Auditorium of the University of Johannesburg, entrance is free, but registration essential. An exhibition is also on display until Monday 22 July. 

First published in iMagazine, the glossy lifestyle magazine of City Press. Subscribe here, we do!

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For the first time, South African design is out in full force at the Design Miami/Basel event in Switzerland, starting today and running until 16 June 2013. The work of 17 designers and artists is being showcased by Southern Guild.

“We are extremely excited to be presenting the fresh voice of South African collectable design to a Basel audience at the most important design forum in the world,” said Trevyn McGowan, founder and director of Southern Guild. 

Southern Guild is South Africa’s most high-profile proponent of luxury indigenous design and regularly curates and commissions large-scale exhibitions of unique once-off pieces by the crème of our country’s artists and designers. The most recent exhibition in South Africa was Heavy Metal at the Woodstock Foundry, Cape Town, in February and the annual Southern Guild exhibition at the Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg, in August 2012 (read more here). 

The work showing at Design Miami/Basel is mostly drawn from these two exhibitions, including Joe Paine’s steampunk-flavoured crank desk that VISI nominated for the Most Beautiful Object in South Africa award at this year’s Design Indaba. Also drawn from last year’s exhibition is Dokter and Misses’s hand-painted solid wood cabinet inspired by Burkina Faso mud dwellings. Porky Hefer’s leather weaver’s nest for humans will also be on display. 

The ongoing collaboration between furniture designer Gregor Jenkin and artist William Kentridge, initiated at last year’s exhibition, has produced a new chair inspired by the artist’s torn-paper work. Willowlamp will also show exquisite brand new mandala-themed chandeliers. And sculptor Dylan Lewis embarks on an exploration of the functional with a monumental, abstract console.

Work by the likes of Andile Dyalvane (watch our video interview here), Brett Murray, Bronze Age and Conrad Hicks was selected from the Heavy Metal exhibition. Other designers include Michaella Janse van Vuuren, Ceramic Matters and Laurie Wiid van Heerden.

The press release says it best: “Artisanal, handmade and cerebral, South African design elicits a physical response as much as it invites a viewer to think. Some of this experiential quality derives from the handmade nature of the work. Its distinctiveness is grounded in social and political realities, narrative, a true bond with nature and a sense of human connectedness with little interest in passing trends or in highly polished, technologically driven visions of design.”

Well, Design Miami/Basel, and Europe in general, we hope you get the message, with love, from Africa. VISI can’t think of a better cast of designers to be delivering it!

www.southernguild.co.za

Kemang Wa Lehulere has won the 15th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel, read more here.

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Entitled The Objects Show, this is the third annual group exhibition of intimately scaled, new and vintage works by international designers. Curated by R20th Century’s principals, Evan Snyderman and Zesty Meyers, the exhibition is a culmination of many years collecting works while travelling the world.

The end result includes work from Brazil, Germany, Korea, Lebanon, South Africa and the United States, ranging from jewellery, vessels, objects for the home and toys, to small furniture, ceramics and sculptural works. Much of the objects defy classification but all portray elegance or whimsy and exemplary craftsmanship. When viewed together, the objects illustrate ideas about the creative process, inspiration and how many of the artists and designers draw from the vernacular of their origin’s design history and craftsmanship.

Straddling the realms of sculpture and design, Michaellaʼs mythical creatures are hand-drawn and then produced one at a time by exploring the possibilities of 3D-printing and rapid prototyping. The mythical forms are inspired by her African context and personal imaginings. Featuring an intricate mechanical functioning, the work takes the notion of making dreams real to a whole new level.

Says Zesty: “This exhibition looks at global design’s cross pollination of ideas, inspirations and processes, and offers a broad view of how and why people create objects.”

R20th Century gallery www.r20thcentury.com

Michaella Janse van Vuuren www.nomili.co.za

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Piet Hein Eek’s prototype lamp at Tom Dixon

The Dock, Tom Dixon’s headquarters at Portobello Dock, has become an out-of-the-way gathering spot during the London Design Festival. This year, he invited Nika Zupanc and Piet Hein Eek to exhibit in his shop, where Piet unveiled this huge multi-shade lamp, a prototype for a new design we’ll be seeing more of soon.

South African designers at MINT

A great surprise was spotting one of Willowlamp’s chandeliers in the window of Mint in the Brompton Design District. For the London Design Festival, owner Lina Kanafani put together an eclectic range of pieces by upcoming South African talent, which included Adam Hoets’s lights, Gregor Jenkin’s furniture and 3-D sculptures by Michaella Janse van Vuuren.

Benjamin Hubert at designjunction

Young London-based industrial designer Benjamin Hubert’s new Pelt chair for De La Espada seamlessly wraps a Tshirt-shaped plywood seat around solid wood legs. Every detail is resolved, resulting in an elegant but economical piece that looks timeless. As part of his exhibit at designjunction, Benjamin deconstructed each finished product with a display of the materials used – whether cement, cork, plywood or underwear fabric – to reveal his materials-driven process.

JAILmake at TENT London

London design studio JAILmake took exposing their work processes one step further, by condensing their 205sqm workshop into a 5sqm stand at TENT London. They had no products on show, yet visitors walking past stood in wonder, while the three designers worked on projects, undeterred. “We’re worried that designing and making are becoming distanced, and we want to bring them back together,” they said.

The new Central Saint Martins campus

Designed by architects Stanton Williams, the campus is the creative heart of a massive urban regeneration project that has transformed 67 acres of derelict land to the north of King’s Cross and St Pancras International railway stations. The college, situated in a converted granary and two railway transit sheds, was the site of the Global Design Forum, a one-day conference that invited luminaries such as Yves Béhar and Thomas Heatherwick to engage in debates about pressing issues affecting the design world. 

Design Indaba will be uploading all their London Design Festival videos over the next few weeks. See them all here.

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