Recently, a 3D-printing company called Ai Build has teamed up with luxury fashion brand Bottletop to launch a new project in London. The project was Ai Build has completed the interior design for the Bottletop’s flagship brick and mortar store. They finished the design by using robotic fabrication and recycled materials. The interior of the 3D-printed store was completed by using filament and Reflow, an “ink” provider whose filament is made up entirely of recycled plastic waste. The project is used as an example of how fashion and construction can be used together in a sustainable way, without excluding beautiful designs.
“What is so special about 3D printing is that it opens up the possibility to control precisely where every single drop of material will be placed to form a physical object,” Daghan Cam, Ai Build’s co-founder and CEO, told Digital Trends. “That basically means that the material is deposited only where it needs to be, [in contrast] to conventional subtractive manufacturing methods which can be extremely wasteful.”
Ai Build in the past has made powerful impacts with their construction of sophisticated structures, meticulously built using Kuka Robots and machine vision algorithms. Last year, the London-based startup revealed its “Daedalus Pavilion” at a conference in Amsterdam. The 350-pound structure consisted of 48 separate parts, but only took fifteen days to print and complete.
Cam and his team have taken their design work towards the fashion industry by teaming up with Bottletop, a fashion company that creates their goods out of upcycled material as well. They do this to instill sustainable values into a traditionally unsustainable industry.
“Fashion and construction industries are two of the biggest contributors of environmental pollution today,” Cam said. “This project demonstrates how cutting-edge technology can become the solution for such a fundamental problem of humanity as the environmental pollution.”
The Bottletop store is not completely made up of 3D printed material, like the proposed office space in Dubai, but by still using some recycled materials the project still manages to make an impact.
By turning waste plastic from India and Africa into a luxurious construction with our partners, we are questioning the status quo,” Cam added. “We believe that supporting the circular economy and zero-waste design philosophy through projects like this is the key for achieving a sustainable future of our built environment.”
