A design studio called Arquimaña, based in the Basque Country in northern Spain has 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. Source: Fast Company
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.
Bicycles are inherently less polluting than cars because they don’t generate greenhouse gas emissions. But Ares and Albistur wanted to cut pollution from the manufacturing process, too.
First, though a user must find a fabrication lab near them but there are more than 2000 around the globe.
The main body of the bicycle is made from plywood, which the lab cuts out using special machinery. The seat, front hub, and hand grips can be 3D printed out of silicone, or even better, recycled from old bicycles.
The wheels need to be purchased separately. And since the user can build the bicycle in a digital fabrication lab in their own city, there aren’t any emissions from transporting the finished bicycle to the user.
“We were focused on small-scale, local manufacturing,” said Albistur.
OpenBike isn’t necessarily cheaper to make than other bicycles on the market. Buying the plywood and other components will cost around US$500. And this wooden bike is slightly heavier than some of the lightest alternatives out there.
This year, Arquimaña launched the finalized design. And the bicycle was on display inside the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale and at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. So far, seven bicycles have been fabricated using this design, in addition to the founders’ own bikes.
A group of makers in Seoul managed to build a functioning OpenBike in two days.
