Arthur Mamou-Mani on Parametric Architecture

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On Design with Justyna Green brings you insightful conversations with the arts & design's most inspiring figures - from designers to architects, editors to creative directors and everybody in between. If you want to know what inspires them, how they work and how they see the world, this is the podcast for you. Listen to the On Design podcast now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Play.

Architect Arthur Mamou-Mani is this week's podcast guest. Arthur specialises in digital fabrication led architecture and some of his recent projects you'll be familiar with include Galaxia - the Burning Man temple from 2018 and Conifera - last year's COS installation at the Milan Design Week.

In our conversation, we discuss Arthur's practice, parametric architecture, his FabPub 3D printing and laser cutting facilities in East London which are available to all and we also get personal, chatting about what it's like to get married at the Burning Man and overcome depression.

HIGHLIGHTS & TIMESTAMPS

00:05 

I want to look at interesting, meaningful things, I want to highlight them, I want to show how they’re linked to nature and how nature is really an artistic venture of slight adaptations and parameters that create beautiful things.

06:15 

When you walk in a forest and you see really interesting patterns you don’t ask ‘who designed’ it – who cares? And if you were to ask you realise it’s the cells and the DNA and the bee that comes etc. There are so many parameters to the creation of the beautiful things.

09:00 

There was a big revolution called RepRapp, it was a British doctor Adrian Boyer, he started wanting to replicate a machine, to self-replicate a machine and so he did RepRapp as a machine which can print components of itself, which is a very exciting concept.

12:57

Burning Man is a prototype of a city of the future, that’s what really excited us. 

14:06

Design career is a lifelong thing, it’s not just one project that makes or breaks it. Design is not only a concept – design is delivery, its spreadsheets, funds, entrepreneurship and it’s team work. 

26:58

We used terms ‘designed by’ and that in its essence I find weird because it’s not true. This term ‘designed by someone’ is an inhibitor, it turns the ego switch on.

32:20

Even the movement of 3d printing – somehow when you send information in the form of general code in segments you end up with textures that are reminiscent of nature, because on a very local level the material finds its own equilibrium, similar to what Gaudi was doing with chain models. So once you start letting go of imposing anything on machine, on the Earth, then you start having a natural approach and the material will start to express itself.