Monday, September 28, 2009

Baubike


Bauhaus was a design school that emerged in Germany after World War One. Bauhaus designers and their students broke from tradition and developed a very modernist style. Their primary intention was to integrate art, technology and craftsmanship by ignoring precedent and generating a new design philosophy . The innovative ideas ranged from architecture to furniture design. They believed that design of any sort ought to be considered a high art as does painting or sculpture.
Baubike

4 comments:

kfg said...

I might suggest that a good use for this bike would be transporting your chopsticks designed around the prefect aesthetic of the sphere; but not in that bag in the picture. It is displeasing to the eye in its hollow sagginess and should be redesigned as a solid body.

And what's with those ROUND wheels? They like totally violate the very design standard of the bike just to provide function. As the rest of the bike eschews triangles, allowed in the design standard AND required for structural integrity, I suggest that they should be triangular.

In fact, triangular wheels ought to render the whole thing so structurally stable that the bike might well have a service life of forever; so not just art, but totally green dude!

Adrienne Johnson said...

Super! I love that it is different- there has to be new ways to look at things to keep it interesting. I love their option for a rear passenger seat!

kfg said...

I've nothing against looking at things differently, and I've even built some pretty wacky stuff in my time (I'm still pretty fond of my framing lumber space frame recumbents. Perhaps I should build some more now that it's hip), but when I showed them to people I said, "Here's some wacky stuff I built," not, "My primary intention was to integrate art, technology and craftsmanship by ignoring precedent and generating a new design philosophy."

The fact of the matter is that the Bauhaus school did not create such a new way of looking at bicycles, because the safety bicycle was already perfect Bauhaus. The Bauhaus did not inspire bicycle design, bicycle design inspired the Bauhaus! (So you can blame aluminum lawn chairs and Ikea furniture on the bicycle. They are actually the design descendants).

Nor is this particular bicycle a new way of looking at them. It is, in fact, the old way rehashed, a sort of neo-ultra conservatism; and there are reasons they don't build 'em like that anymore.

In a way it's actually too bad, because I could hand craft a dozen or so custom fitted a day on that design, instead of the hours of designing and week of building, apiece, it takes me now, (although at higher materials cost because of the extra mass of square tubes, which would likely be prohibitively expensive to make in seamless butted).

And it's the perfect design for robotic manufacturing en masse, as opposed to the craftsmanship sought by the "design philosophy," to the point where hand craftsmanship actually wouldn't make a lick of sense.

Too bad they'd all suck, then break.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'm off to make me one. It's some wacky stuff and I think the artsy chicks'll dig it. I dig artsy chicks.

David J said...

Yeh... Some art/design just sucks!
But when they make the artist justify or explain their work that really sucks and it makes the creation suck which if it already sucked would mean that it would also be really uncool... A bit like that bike.