SANTIAGO, Chile — Studio gt2P (Good Things to People) submitted a series of works to Design Miami that are unique because they are crafted in part by an uncontrollable force of nature: volcanic lava from Chile. This is the second piece of design we’ve profiled featuring volcanic rock, please see the first here.
The “Remolten” seats exhibited with the Friedman Benda Gallery booth. The series is made from basaltic andesite, a lightweight and porous stone found near volcanoes in Chile. In addition to shaping an object with one of the most dramatic features of geology, there is a temporal theme within “Remolten” as well. The designers were inspired by the way lava shapes and reshapes the landscape after every new flow:
In nature lava rebuilds its surrounding landscape each time a volcano erupts. The volcanic lava covers and shapes its context, so it becomes a completely new landscape. Therefore, it is impossible to recognize the preexistent singularities; they are destroyed and a new strong beauty is created.
That presents a unique challenge to the studio: how can one control the uncontrollable? The fact that they’re able to craft anything with this process illustrates the agency humanity can have over nature. They are even able to control the final texture of the objects.
The results of this first series are controlled by using temperature curves for different lava expressions (trapelco = smooth, mahuanco = dripped , quitralco = rough).
Still, volcanos have their own schedules and don’t respect anyone else’s. This means that, though the process can be replicated, each piece is wholly unique, a product of its once-in-a-lifetime moment.
About the Studio
From the designers:
We are a studio involved in projects of architecture, art and design, established in Santiago, Chile. We are in a continuous process of research and experimentation in digital crafting, promoting new encounters between the technologies for projecting and the richness of the local expressed in traditional materials and techniques.
Our work methodology has two dimensions. First, we seek to systematize knowledge and observation, whether of natural, artificial, geometric or spatial, phenomena, through generative algorithms. Here parametric design is a tool to guide the planning of projects that we carry out, enabling the integration of its stages of design, development and production.
Bill Rodgers is the Managing Editor of cfile.daily.
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