Joris Laarman Lab

About Joris Laarman Lab

Joris Laarman Lab is a Dutch experimental design studio based at Draaibank in Zaandam, near Amsterdam. Founded by designer Joris Laarman, it operates less like a conventional design practice and more like a research laboratory, describing itself as an experimental playground where ideas are tested and developed physically in high-quality materials.

The Lab sits at the meeting point of craftsmanship and emerging technology, and its output spans furniture, sculpture, digital fabrication research and applied engineering. Its work is represented commercially by Friedman Benda Gallery in New York, and pieces are held in major museum collections internationally.

Philosophy

The studio's stated position is that we are children of a time of transition, with one foot in the industrial era and one in the digital era. That framing drives a specific working method: rather than treating digital tools as a way to generate more imagery, the Lab insists that ideas be built.

Laarman argues that in a digital era producing unprecedented volumes of material, the value of purely visual output is subject to inflation. Making physical objects requires skill that cannot be substituted by computation, because the physical world is unruly and its limitations force genuine experimentation. The studio's view of craftsmanship is explicitly non-nostalgic: it should be understood as continually evolving and, aided by high-tech tools, central to society rather than a heritage activity.

Digital Fabrication Research

The Lab's most influential contribution has been in robotic additive manufacturing. Its research into printing metal in mid-air using multi-axis robotic arms led to the founding of MX3D, now an independent company based on Dynamostraat in Amsterdam that commercialises wire arc additive manufacturing for industrial and structural applications.

That technology produced one of the most widely discussed objects in recent construction research: a 3D-printed stainless steel pedestrian bridge, fabricated by robots and installed in Amsterdam, which demonstrated that additive manufacturing could produce a load-bearing public structure rather than only prototypes and components.

Approach to Making

The studio describes its process as endlessly trying, refining and improving until something emerges that looks like magic to anyone who did not witness the iterations behind it, comparing the method to evolution. In practice this means long development cycles on individual pieces, close collaboration with fabricators and material specialists, and a willingness to develop new production techniques when existing ones cannot deliver the intended result.

Why Joris Laarman Lab Matters to the AEC Industry

For architects and engineers, the Lab is significant less for its furniture than for what it proved about fabrication. Wire arc additive manufacturing, developed from its research and commercialised through MX3D, offers a route to producing complex structural steel geometries without moulds or formwork, which has direct implications for nodes, connections and bespoke structural elements that are prohibitively expensive to fabricate conventionally.

More broadly, the studio is a useful counterweight to purely computational design culture. Its insistence that concepts be physically realised, and its treatment of craft skill as something that evolves alongside technology rather than being replaced by it, speaks directly to a construction industry weighing automation against the practical knowledge held by skilled trades.