<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"View Slideshow\n\nA transformation is under way in the worlds of design and manufacturing. In New York people are having their heads scanned and replicated as plastic busts. In Holland furniture designer Dirk Vander Kooij is producing colorful chairs made of material from recycled refrigerators\u2014each seat customizable with the click of a mouse. A Dutch-Belgian team fit a woman with the world's first jawbone implant.\n\nWhat all these developments have in common\u2014and there are more like them every day\u2014is that they're products of the burgeoning phenomenon of 3-D printing, a technology that affords possibilities not available through conventional fabrication methods. For consumers it means that fully customized on-demand housewares, trinkets and accessories, jewelry, even clothing and furniture might one day be no further away than a local Kinko's-like shop, or better yet, the nearest desktop. For designers and scientists the possibilities are even more intriguing.\n\nRanging in size from smaller than a microwave to bigger than a house, 3-D printers come in different types, deploying a variety of technologies to create solid objects based on digitally mapped designs. Most use software that translates a rendering into a series of sections, like ultrathin slices of bread. With the typical model, moving printer heads then discharge a fast-congealing liquid, maneuvering around and around to produce each slice until the piece appears exactly as it did onscreen, but in physical form.\n\nThis process, called \"additive manufacturing,\" can turn out fully finished items in resin, plastic, metal, or other materials in a matter of hours. Just as with 2-D images, the quality of the final product is measured by its resolution: the thinner the slices, the smoother and more precise the result. The most sophisticated commercial models can manage widths of just 16 microns, achieving fine detail and difficult geometries inconceivable with old-fashioned \"subtractive\" methods such as woodcutting or carving.\n\nFinnish designer Janne Kyttanen has been in the 3-D\u2013printing field for 15 years and now works as creative director of the U.S.\u2013based 3D Systems, which manufactures a wide range of printers in addition to providing print-to-order services online. \"When I started using 3-D printers, the question was, What can I make that I couldn't make before?\" says Kyttanen, whose pieces have found their way into the collection at New York's Museum of Modern Art. These days, he says, \"whatever you can stack, you can print.\" Littered around 3D Systems' Manhattan showroom are a dizzying array of everyday items, some of them Kyttanen's own designs, including a belt, shoes, and colorful smartphone cases.\n\nAnother pioneer in consumer-oriented 3-D printing is the Brooklyn company MakerBot. The creator of the popular Replicator line of desktop printers, MakerBot also maintains an online database of digital designs for printable objects. \"Our main focus is on creating a machine that's powerful enough for a pro to use, but affordable enough that everyone else can, too,\" says CEO Bre Pettis. Featured on the firm's website is a project to produce 3-D\u2013printed mechanical hands for children with orthopedic disabilities; as Pettis observes, \"When you're 10 years old, you're growing fast,\" requiring thousands of dollars' worth of replacement prostheses. With MakerBot's Robohand designs, families can get customized synthetic hands and fingers for merely a few dollars.\n\nCurator and design entrepreneur Murray Moss showcased the aesthetic possibilities of the technology in a 2011 London Design Festival exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, called \"Industrial Revolution 2.0: How the Material World Will Newly Materialise.\" Turning to the Belgium-based company MGX by Materialise, Moss commissioned several artist-designed printed pieces. For one, a 19th-century marble bust from the museum's collection was replicated in exact detail from a 3-D scan, with the addition of an ornate hat designed by milliner Stephen Jones.\n\nMGX has been at the forefront of 3-D\u2013printed furniture, producing work by such designers as Mathias Bengtsson, Joris Laarman, and Patrick Jouin. The latter's One_Shot.MGX is a collapsible stool with flexible legs and hinges but no detachable components\u2014a perfect example of how 3-D printing can enable inventive engineering solutions. Others using the technology to make sturdy, lightweight, and beautiful furnishings include Vander Kooij, Dutch designer Bram Geenen, whose Gaudi stool and chair achieve ultra-thinness through precisely modeled weight distribution, and the Stockholm-based firm Kram/Weisshaar, whose Multithread table's spindly metal legs belie their carefully calibrated strength.\n\nFor architects, 3-D printing means a new way of creating not just scale models of buildings but also the actual structures themselves. Currently it's slow going\u2014an Amsterdam canal house by the Dutch firm DUS Architects will take three years to complete\u2014but the potential for dynamic new forms and efficient construction is great. For a 2008 design competition, Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars conceived Landscape House, which he hopes to start printing next year using a sandstone compound. The building comprises a single loop\u2014a twisted continuous surface that would have been daunting to construct from poured concrete. Ruijssenaars is collaborating with Enrico Dini, the Italian engineer who developed D-Shape, the world's largest 3-D printer. As the architect explains, \"Fifty percent of what you see [in the rendering] will be printed,\" supplemented with concrete and steel for added structural strength.\n\nWhile the future of 3-D printing is still fairly speculative, some of its boosters are already looking to the stars: Dini sees a prospective application in lunar housing, which he has been investigating in conjunction with architect Sir Norman Foster. Others, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2013based architect and computer scientist Skylar Tibbits, are beginning to develop \"4-D\" printing, the production of materials that transform themselves into preprogrammed shapes when they come into contact with water.\n\nDespite its tremendous advances, 3-D printing has yet to make its way into the average person's everyday life. \"It's too early to understand how we're going to engage with this on a daily level,\" says curator Alex Newson of London's Design Museum, whose current exhibition, \"The Future Is Here: A New Industrial Revolution,\" features on-site 3-D printing. \"Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital,\" a show opening in October at Manhattan's Museum of Arts and Design, will explore similar terrain, demonstrating for a still-uncertain public how 3-D printing can turn computerized visions into reality.\n\nBut for the early adopters, the new world of 3-D printing is already at hand. As Pettis puts it, the 22,000-plus MakerBot owners are \"living in that future now. It's just a question of when everyone else catches up.\"\n\nClick here to view the slide show of amazing 3-D-printed creations."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/3d-printing-dirk-vander-kooij-janne-kyttanen-article>