Bio-Design

"Whenever we talk about biodesign we should simply bear in mind just how amazingly superior a spider’s web is to any load-bearing structure man has made – and then derive from this insight that we should look to the superiority of nature for the solutions. If we want to tackle a new task in the studio, then it’s best to go outside first and look at what millenia-old answers there may already be to the problem." Luigi Colani

For over five decades now Colani has been the unabashed agent provocateur of the design world. He thinks in terms of grand utopias, creating ingenious drafts for designs that preempt much of what is not yet technically feasible. While the design world has spent decades endeavoring like the Renaissance to quantify design tasks in terms of rules and laws, Colani acts like the Mannerists who succeeded the Renaissance and breaks all the rules to paint an unpredictable and moving picture of how the future could be designed. It is precisely because of these qualitites that at present Colani’s working ideas are being rediscovered and reinterpreted world-wide – driven by a younger generation of designers such as Ross Lovegrove and Karim Rashid, who likewise believe that anatomy, technology and 3D shapes must form the basis if design is to be duly holistic and biomorphic.