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To 3D Print Coney Island

One artist is recreating a 100-year-old amusement park with very new technology.

Fred Kahl, a creative director and designer at New York media firm Funny Garbage, is using a very new technology to create a very old thing. The new technology: MakerBot 3D printers. The old thing: The demolished Luna Park amusement park at Coney Island—resurrected detail by detail, ride by ride.

“Long ago, I came to the realization that I just wanted to make work for myself and not play the gallery game,” Kahl says about his dream to spend 30 years quietly creating a single diorama. “Since I first learned about Luna Park, I knew it would be my Étant donnés,” referring to Duchamp’s miniature Xanadu.

Kahl’s introduction to Coney Island in 1984 consumed his imagination, like it did for many artists who have painted, photographed, and performed there. “There was still a lot of traces of the old Coney Island left at that time, but it was in this magical state of decay,” he says. It was Ric Burns's 1991 Coney Island documentary on PBS’s American Experience that sparked the idea of bringing Luna Park back to life: “I would recreate the park in matchsticks during my retirement,” Kahl thought.

Luna Park’s designer Frederic Thompson was a turn-of-the-century renegade who dropped out of the Beaux Art Academy to create fantastical proto-postmodern architecture by mixing and matching disparate styles. All this was further embellished by hundreds of thousands of Edison's new light bulbs. Rem Koolhaas cites Coney Island and Thompson in his book Delirious New York as an early influence on the skyscraper.

“What is special to me about Luna Park is the fantasy architecture and its particular place in history as society was transformed by technology,” Kahl says. “These are themes that are relevant to us today as our world is transformed by the third industrial revolution. Its also about a deep love of Coney Island as the cultural melting pot and showcase for cutting-edge technologies.”

Kahl is not a nostalgist, though. “Creating inspiring fantasy architecture is also important to me amidst the city's rezoning of Coney's amusement zone,” he says. “There's a lot of development that's going to happen out there and I'd prefer to see innovative architectural forms instead of bland refrigerator boxes.” If his MakerBot opus can influence that, he says, that “would be great.”

First he has to make sure the five 3D printers working out of his home studio are churning out the goods. “At any given time I have at least three machines printing," he says. "I try to start prints every morning and every evening. It’s still a lot of work maintaining them, though; bearings need replacing, boards fry, extruders clog. I can't even tell you how many hours I've put into this. It’s totally obsessive.”

To 3D Print Coney Island

Reference: www.theatlantic.com

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