When Microsoft approached Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves last November, offering to partner with them to realize a project of their dreams, it probably goes without saying that the duo jumped at the opportunity. Murakami, an architect, and Groves, an artist, make up the London-based studio SWINE (short for Super Wide Interdisciplinary New Explorers), and they were given only one requirement by Microsoft: to use its Surface Pro 3, a 12-inch, all-in-one tablet meant to compete with laptops currently on the market.
SWINE typically focuses on what Murakami and Groves describe as "luxury artisanship," with projects that are often handcrafted using a range of production techniques and innovative material applications. (You may have seen SWINE's Hair Highway, which uses hair to create a series of vessels, when it made the rounds of the design blogs a few months back.) With the Microsoft-sponsored project, the duo wanted to push things in a new direction. "We aren't a very tech studio," Groves says. "So we embraced the opportunity to do a lot of tech things, such as 3D scanning, modeling and CNC milling."
Murakami and Groves had been closely following the recent NASA mission to place the Philae lander on comet 67P. "It was such a plucky and inspiring mission," Grove says. "We really wanted to celebrate that incredible feat in some way." In addition, he notes, the studio had "always wanted to make heels." Those two desires came together with the Meteorite Shoes, a pair of high heels that, as Groves describes them, "capture the look and sensation of large rocks suspended in zero gravity."
Top and above photos by Petr Krejci
Groves first called up a geologist he knew at London's Natural History Museum, pumping him for everything he knew about meteorites. The designer then made a trip to the vaults deep beneath the museum to see what is widely considered the best meteorite collection in the world. "We put together a proposal and had just three weeks to do the research, design, find the fabricators and make the project," Groves says. "It was like D-Day. There was no time for a prototype." For the material, they settled on aluminum foam, typically reserved for industrial processes such as energy absorption and compression beams in luxury cars—but perfect for its ability, Groves says, to form "bulky, rock-like irregular forms and be incredibly light and strong."
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