A marriage of craft and robots
Ammar Kalo’s Carabus collection is inspired by nature, made in the UAE, formed by robots and crafted by people.
BY AIDAN IMANOVA
Sharjah-based designer, architect and educator Ammar Kalo has long been interrogating the relationship between digital technology and traditional craft through his practice, KALO, creating pieces like the Stratum chair and the N-Bowl—both of which are now part of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum’s permanent collection in New York. His latest work, the Carabus collection, is possibly an even deeper examination of the marriage between craft and robotics.
Consisting of a coffee table, stool, and mirror, the Carabus collection aims to address topics such as the tacit knowledge of materiality and craftsmanship through a contemporary lens. While the objects look handcrafted, they have in fact been formed using advanced robotic fabrication. The collection embraces the imperfections of the process while highlighting both machine and craft using the unlikely tool of a robot arm.
“Forming tool marks are celebrated throughout the collection and recall the qualities of handcrafted objects,” says Kalo, who is currently director of labs at the College of Architecture, Art and Design at the American University of Sharjah.
“The surface dimples not only reflect the traditional craft of hand-forming metals, but also add strength to the pieces by stiffening the metal near the edges.”
The forms and textures of Carabus are loosely inspired by a beetle—it is what gives the collection its name—using copper as a base material for its soft and easily manipulated nature as well as its link to traditional metalwork. The copper is accented with camel leather and walnut, which have been crafted by hand to add a sense of refinement and sophistication. The mirror is tinted to complement the collection’s cohesive colour palette of sandy copper and rich brown.
Kalo has long been developing metal-shaping techniques using a process called incremental sheet-metal forming: a robotic arm with a simple round forming tool is programmed to follow a tool-path and slowly push against the metal sheet until the desired shape is achieved, without requiring a mould.
“I would say this collection is a natural step in my evolution as a designer, both in terms of form and fabrication. The pieces also integrate more materials, and their inner workings are a lot more complex,” he adds.
Much of Kalo’s work is framed under an approach he calls “Soft States,” which conceptualises the notion of “softness” in materiality and fabrication, be it visually or formally. Used as a generative tool to aid various design decisions within his projects, it is also the formula that ties his many projects together. The idea of “softness” in this case instrumentalises the malleable state of a material to create unique forms of expression by exploring the nature of the material and finding ways to manipulate it through specific tooling.
“Even though some parts of the project were made using a robot, I made sure that the forms and textures still have an organic softness to them, so the fabrication method doesn’t completely overtake the project,” Kalo explains.
