Mazda’s Crossed Folds

“A cross are also lines”, a Dutch stand-up comedian joked this week when playing a coke-sniffing priest. Although the images shown here might remind you to a time you had a rush, I mean to show them to illustrate the next step in car design.

I am not kidding. In the past year the Japanese carmaker Mazda has been working consistently on a new form language, and this week unveiled their most extreme ‘sculpture’ yet: the Mazda Furai. A car designed to take the 24h Le Mans challenge.

The design features ‘crossed folds’ everywhere. Normal steel plates feature only single folds, but here multiple folds are applied that cross each other diagonally. That is completely new. Unprecedented.

Kas Oosterhuis from ONL is already thinking for years how to build architecture with such plates. Because there is no manufacturer yet to handle it, ONL has just realized some dwellings in Amsterdam with crossed folds of some sort: steel plates that fold inwards to an open seam - instead of folding outwards in the closed seam, like Mazda does. The result is devastatingly ugly.

The right kind of styling is applied in the design of the new Roche headquarters in Basel, designed by Herzog & de Meuron.

Unfortunately Mazda has not yet unveiled more that one image of the Mazda Furai, though there are more images of the the design at Edmunds Inside Line. Because of that single image, I had to look at the older concept cars, of which I especially love the Mazda Taiki. I adore the flowing interior. It is so much, it is too much, it is maximalism.

Maximalism is our future. Maximalism is the end of good taste. Maximalism moves the border of good taste a little further and thereby makes room for emergent futures.

“Architects are obsessed with good taste”, Crimson writes in their book ‘Too blessed to be depressed’. I think that is true. But I also think that taste moves in a certain direction, in the direction of form, of maximum form. Zaha Hadid is just the beginning

Source :  http://www.eikongraphia.com