COS promotes circular design with bioplastic installation at MDW19

French architect Arthur Mamou-Mani has assembled a structure made of 700 bioplastic bricks in the courtyard of a 16th-century palace as this year’s Milan Design Week installation for fashion brand COS. Mamou-Mani – whose previous projects include a temple for the Burning Man festival – I wanted to show how design can be part of a more circular economy, harnessing the potential of renewable materials and sustainable processes. The result is a large-scale parametric structure composed of modular eco-bricks, each 3D printed from a mixture of polylactic acid (PLA) — a fully compostable bioplastic that is made using renewable resources — and wood. They are held together using PLA clamps. The 30-meter-long installation, Conifera, was displayed in the courtyard of Palazzo Isimbardi in Milan from April 9 to 14 as part of the city's annual design week. Only three colors feature throughout the installation, ranging from white for orange and brown. The translucent elements are PLA in its purest form, while the white sections contain a pigment, and the earthy colors are obtained by adding wood pulp to the mix.

Mamou-Mani and his team printed all the bricks over a two-month period using four printers, with each print taking between four and seven hours. Each bio-brick has a lattice structure to make the most of the material’s strength, but also to allow light to permeate the installation. This lattice structure also gives the delicate-looking installation an unexpected density. According to Mamou-Mani, the material shares a similar density to foam, but is capable of supporting more than two tons of weight. Unlike last year's COS installation by American artist Phillip K Smith III , which occupied only the palace courtyard, Conifera extends into the garden in order to establish a dialogue between nature, architecture and technology. The installation is named after the Conifer tree - the wood of which was used to print the structure. According to Mamou-Mani, the design was also inspired by the pine cones found on these trees, as the shape of the two bricks resembles the shape of a cone .