Urban Reef on Using 3D Printing and Natural Materials for Greener Cities

Additive manufacturing is a focus of interest in many fields because of its potential not only in terms of digitizing manufacturing, but also for more sustainable production. For example, there are currently a number of projects using natural materials as 3D printing materials including clay, soil, food waste, coffee, and more! Additive manufacturing makes it possible to transform these materials, by recycling or taking them from nature, and make many previously unimaginable applications with them. This can be seen as well with Dutch startup Urban Reef, which has combined cutting-edge technologies, 3D printing and natural materials to imagine and design greener, more inclusive and welcoming cities. They have developed structures called Reefs that they hope will help revolutionize the cities of tomorrow, thus providing a viable solution to climate change and pollution reduction challenges. To learn more, we interviewed one of the co-founders, Max Latour.

3DN: Could you introduce yourself and your connection to 3D printing

Max Latour (left) and Pierre Oskam (right)

I’m Max Latour, one of the founders of Urban Reef and a computational designer with a background in architecture. I initiated my studies at the faculty of architecture at the TU Eindhoven, where I had my first brief encounters with 3D printing. After completing my bachelor’s degree, I moved to the TU Delft for my master’s, drawn by its emphasis on architectural design. Here I started to develop my interest in computational design.

Initially, my obsession was with designing organic shapes, but this quickly evolved into an interest in natural morphogenetic processes and the potential of translating those into design tools. Eventually I graduated my master’s degree at the Robotic Building Lab, a studio within the faculty of architecture using computational design tools and 1:1 prototyping using robotic manufacturing processes.