SALIX REGIONALIS 3D

ABOUT SAL­IX RE­GIO­N­ALIS 3D

Con­ceived by St­ef­fi Sil­ber­mann, the SAL­IX RE­GIO­N­ALIS 3D pro­ject in­volves a com­bi­na­tion of el­e­ments from tra­di­tio­n­al bas­ketweav­ing, tex­tile tech­nol­o­gy, and mold­ed-wood tech­nol­o­gy. Build­ing on the fa­miliar prin­ci­ples of plait­ing and weav­ing, we de­vel­op wo­ven lat­tices that share the char­ac­teris­tics of con­ven­tio­n­al wood prod­ucts. Lay­ered as flat sur­faces and mold­ed in­to load-bear­ing three-di­men­sio­n­al com­po­nents, SAL­IX RE­GIO­N­ALIS 3D com­bines the flex­i­bil­i­ty and ten­sile strength of tex­tiles with the struc­tu­ral sta­bil­i­ty and com­pres­sive strength of mold­ed wood. The wo­ven struc­ture of the sur­faces en­ables us to man­u­fac­ture com­po­nents that are sub­s­tan­tial­ly more ma­te­rial-ef­fi­cient than tra­di­tio­n­al solid-con­struc­tion mold­ed wood, lead­ing to wel­come re­duc­tions in weight. When used in tran­s­por­ta­tion ap­pli­ca­tions, for ex­am­ple, th­ese sav­ings add up to enor­mous economies, which in turn re­duce fu­el con­sump­tion. In vis­i­ble ap­pli­ca­tions, SAL­IX RE­GIO­N­ALIS 3D’s mix of tra­di­tio­n­al ma­te­rial, dist­inc­tive weave, and CAD si­m­u­la­tion brings a nov­el for­mal vo­cab­u­lary to the worlds of mold­ed-wood tech­nol­o­gy and wick­er con­sumer goods.

THE MA­TE­RIAL

In­spired by the cen­turies-old tra­di­tion of bas­ketweav­ing, SAL­IX RE­GIO­N­ALIS 3D is an in­vesti­ga­tion of wil­low in the form of with­es (split and whole) and strips. Wil­low pos­sess­es ex­cep­tio­n­al qual­i­ties of ten­sil­i­ty and flex­i­bil­i­ty. A fast-grow­ing, coarse-grained wood, it is quite light, even in large quan­ti­ties, which gives SAL­IX RE­GIO­N­ALIS 3D the char­ac­teris­tics of a lightweight, sta­ble, in­di­vi­d­u­al­ly mold­able, cus­tomiz­able wood-based con­struc­tion ma­te­rial. The use of wil­low al­so cre­ates in­ter­est­ing in­cen­tives for agri­cul­ture and forestry. The tech­nol­o­giza­tion of the land­s­cape that sur­rounds us has gone large­ly un­no­ticed. What ap­pears to be na­ture is in fact a care­ful­ly mea­sured and con­trolled land­s­cape sys­tem de­signed for the cul­ti­va­tion of a wide va­ri­e­ty of plants. Be­cause wil­low grows in poor, wet soils, it re­quires less in­ter­ven­tion in the land­s­cape. As an al­ter­na­tive to the cost and ef­fort of fer­til­iz­ing poor soils or im­prov­ing flood-prone, na­t­u­ral­ly wet bot­tom­lands, the cul­ti­va­tion of wil­low in such ar­eas of­fers a way to pre­serve the bal­ance of na­ture.

LIGHTWEIGHT CON­STRUC­TION

The SAL­IX RE­GIO­N­ALIS 3D lat­tice does not func­tion as a cov­er­ing the way tex­tiles do. Its wo­ven struc­ture is a min­i­mal­is­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the phys­i­cal forces at work on a struc­tu­ral el­e­ment – an in­ter­face, so to speak, be­tween us­er, ma­te­rial, and grav­i­ty, giv­ing tan­gi­ble form to physics. An op­ti­mized CAD mod­el­ing pro­cess is used to pre­cise­ly an­a­lyze the re­la­tion­ships be­tween the ap­pli­ca­tion-spe­cif­ic three-di­men­sio­n­al form of a SAL­IX RE­GIO­N­ALIS 3D com­po­nent and the orig­i­nal two-di­men­sio­n­al lat­tice, re­sult­ing in a lightweight, ex­treme­ly ma­te­rial-ef­fi­cient wood-based mo­d­ule that is pre­cise­ly cal­i­brat­ed to the de­mands placed on it and char­ac­ter­ized by fluid forms.

Pro­ject Part­n­er: Kreutzfeldt GmbH & Ko. KG www.k-formholz.de