Bio-Design by Luigi Colani

Unabashed agent provocateur of industrial design, Luigi Colani created a four-rooms-in-one space-saving house with a 20 sq. ft. (6 meter) cylinder inside that contains a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom.

Colani is an advocate of Bio-Design and has been joined by a younger generation of designers like captain organic Ross Lovegrove and Karim Rashid who pre-empt the technically feasible using a fusion of art and organic design. The German-born Colani applied his unique ideas to produce cars, trucks, boats, aircraft (he studied aerodynamic design at Sorbonne in Paris), motocycles, Colani tea pots, mineral water bottles, SLR cameras and sun-glasses.

As Lovegrove describes his fellow techno-anthropomorphic believer, "Colani’s place is secured as perhaps the most influential form visionary of the twentieth century in the field of industrial design. He remains ever relevant, connecting man to machine in the most profoundly utopian of ways."

A cylinder located inside the modular cabin rotates left or right bringing the room you want into view of the main living room. There's a separate toilet and a small hallway, and the moving parts are controlled with a remote. Colani's house, not unlike Kurokawa's Nakagin Tower, was designed with young professionals who need minimal space while they focus on career in mind.

As a designer, Colani saw his responsibility to translate nature into design as paramount, using the birds wing as evolutions design for aerodynamics in aircraft and automobile design. His C-Form designs from the 1960s established a shape language seen for years in vehicles such as the Corvette. Later Colani moved to Japan where he designed the Canon T9 camera body, applying bio-forms that we see in all SLR digital cameras today.

Bio-design's signature in Colani's work is rounded, organic forms that he sees as the biodynamic. Colani himself wrote, "Everything on the microcosmic as well as the macroscopic plane is made up of curves... I can only obey the laws of nature."

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Design Museum website: designmuseum.org

Colani website: colani.de