If you could build your own bicycle, would that make you more eager to skip the car and cycle around your city?
A design studio called Arquimaña, based in the Basque Country in northern Spain, is betting on it. For the past four years, they’ve been working on an open source design for a wooden bicycle—called OpenBike—that can be downloaded for free. Their goal was to design the most sustainable bicycle on the market and make it possible for anyone to construct it from scratch.
Raquel Ares and Iñaki Albistur, founders of the studio Arquimaña, provide prototyping and digital manufacturing services to other designers and creators. In 2017, they came up with the concept of OpenBike, after observing that in Basque Country, much like other places, the streets were clogged with highly polluting cars. They wanted to develop an eco-friendly bicycle that people could get excited about building themselves and received financial support from the department of planning, housing, and transport of the Basque government to do so.This year, Arquimaña launched the finalized design. And the bicycle is currently on display inside the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. So far, seven bicycles have been fabricated using this design, in addition to the founders’ own bikes, which they use to ride around Basque Country. A group of makers in Seoul managed to build a functioning OpenBike in two days. “It was really amazing to see our vision come to life,” says Albistur. “People anywhere in the world can now download the design and make their own OpenBike.”
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