Blow & Roll

We have been commissioned by the London Design Festival to design an installation for the V&A Museum. With the great help of Polish Cultural Institute, we have started the process in June, we went through all of the stages of prototyping and we have just finished! It was built in a unique FiDU technology and made even more unique - it is the world’s first rolled steel profile! The installation, called Blow and Roll is made of large-scale steel elemens of different lengths up to 20m and of different heights. The problem and the challenge was to bring it to the garden in one piece, like all the other pieces of the Museum’s exhibition. To achieve it, pieces were transported to London and brought to the garden flat and rolled, and then they were inflated with air to the final shape. The aim for the installation is to take advantage of FiDU’s flexibility and to create objects that will interact with the dominating form of a pond (fountain) giving it the 3rd dimension. To strengthen the effect, glossy stainless steel was used – reflecting itself in the water, surroundings and the elements – one in another. For Oskar Zieta, the new installation is a milestone in his research on the efficient production chain of steel constructions – but it also is a play with design. Zieta shows different pieces for each exhibition and they are each time fitted to different function - thanks to the flexibility of the FiDU process developed by him at the ETH in Zurich. The poetry and the uniqueness of his design forms is an effect of a “controlled loss of control” which means joining the parameters of the free deformation and the control of the parameters such as: thickness of steel sheet, the direction of rolling of the material, the geometry of the shapes of the elements and the overall proportions of the form.