UnSolid | Mauro del Santo

UnSolid by Mauro del Santo

Design morphology is at the heart of the new and groundbreaking technology of representing objects in a more structural & computational way. One such project is Mauro del Santo’s swirling and attractive looking lamp design & partition wall.

Courtesy of Mauro del Santo

According to what the lead senior designer Valerio Isacchini, junior designer Julia Cavallini, and equally importantly – the matematician Alessandro Evangelisa have created as a prototype, the design rationale for their luminaire body and the partition wall comes from the development and re-contextualisation of Euclediean geometry with the help of mathematical computations and innovative materials manifacturing. The team of three together have combined skills – craft and mind, and thus have produced an ingenious looking piece which great matematicians from the past shave suggested yet have not had the knowledge to conceive and create.

Courtesy of Mauro del Santo

Looking at UnSolid, this object is an example of a visual example of hyperbolic geometry, introduces by Lobachevsky. This modern conception of geometry helps designers escape from the Eucledian 2D plane and its postulates in order to render their futuristic ideas with the use of CAD and absract mathematical processing. Speaking of abstract processing, the UnSolid is quite reminiscent of M. C. Escher’s tessalations and visualisations of hyperbolic geometry.

Courtesy of Mauro del Santo

So how exactly does the team of UnSolid stand out from the vastly popular fashion for computer-generated geometry? They introduce design morphology at the core of the interior and furniture design research in their career. Analysing and synthesising the need of light with that of its efficient spread-in-space and emotional-health impact on the human body, the team uses mathematical trigonometric functions for all 3 coordinates of the 3D space in order to achieve a striking result. And the outcome is that with the use of computer generated geometry they have a clear idea of how to effectively and efficiently use material – in this case, wood.

The team’s modus operandi is fast and economic in its essence, involving new and simple woodworking techniques with primitve and very easy-to-follow construction method. Simplicity, quite present in the studio’s UnSolid lighting design, is indeed the ultimate form of sophistication [Leonardo da Vinci].