STARTS PRIZE ’18 – Grand Prize – Innovative Collaboration
The project’s most iconic image shows robots autonomously printing a steel bridge over a canal. The MX3D bridge project thus started as a visionary moonshot project, an artist’s dream. Several years later that dream has been solidified in the 3D printed stainless steel bridge. This fully functional pedestrian bridge for the city center of Amsterdam will be completed in 2018, to be placed at its final location soon after.
The bridge will also be rigged with a sensor system, allowing our team of data centric engineers to generate data on the structural behavior which will inform a digital twin. That twin will help to evolve the initial form language into a truly novel digital aesthetics.
The bridge offers the ultimate proof we can now print large, beautiful, and intelligently designed structures in metals. It turned out that visualizing how this technology could impact our future was the missing link as the project easily mobilized scientists, companies, and citizens around this shared dream.
For the team of printers, material scientists, Erasmus scholarships, engineers, and city officials the bridge project became a playground, allowing for unconstraint tinkering on the introduction of these types of technology in a city environment.
Designed by Joris Laarman Lab, the bridge serves as a metaphor, aesthetically connecting ancient Amsterdam to a new age of possibilities. The artistic drive of the Lab was the fundament of this project, which inspired the innovative collaboration that was needed to realize the project.
The frame of the bridge consists of 8mm thick tubes. In the handrail, which is part of the construction, two 3 mm plates regularly connect, creating a strong ‘waffle’ structure. As the two bridge heads are not perfectly aligned, the bridge curls towards the other side in an S-shape. The force lines created by this shape dominate the structure, both structurally and visually.
How it all began
A 2011 Lab experiment ultimately led to the creation of the multi-disciplinary team MX3D and its 3D printed Bridge project. This first project, MX3D Resin, mainly served as a proof of concept. It showed that one could venture far beyond the boundaries of the classic building volume. The team managed to print large scale objects without the need for support structure. By mobilizing the robot it could print on a virtually unlimited scale. The overwhelming response to the Resin Project showed an intense and shared desire within the creative tech community to break free from those constraints. By dissolving this mental barrier, Joris Laarman Lab and MX3D played a critical part in speeding up the development around large-scale 3D printing.
The first MX3D piece was a 2 x 4 x 1.5-meter sculpture designed by Joris Laarman, the Dragon Bench. This proved that it was now possible to 3D print metals on a scale previously unthinkable. Fantasizing further on the potential applications, MX3D created a bridge design concept.
Credits:
This project is a collaboration by MX3D and Joris Laarman Lab.
Robotic 3D-printing, concept, innovative collaborations, execution: MX3D
Design, concept and bridge design: Joris Laarman Lab
MX3D Team, current: Gijs van der Velden, Tim Geurtjens, Joris Laarman, Anita Star, Filippo Gilardi, Boyan Mihaylov, Kasper Siderus, Casey Hemingway, Thomas van Glabeke, Jean Francois Moulin, Barney Salsby, Rasmus Frankel, Diane Toxopeus, Cas Nieuwland, Daan Goedkoop, Teun van der Velden.
MX3D Team, previous: Jakob Schmidt, Simon Rudolph, Anne Bekker, Yara Azouni, Paco Bockelmann, Olli Lina, Niek Sanders, Pierre Mostert, Giovanni Lavanna, Jan Pactl, Antoine Crochemore, Leonidas Stravoudakis, Robbin Sio, Ludvig Holmen, Alexandre Francingues, Kristian Petrov, Job van der Ham, Zakaria Alami, Theodoor Koelewijn, Rudolph de Sonnaville, Andrej Mikelj, Daan Colpaert.
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