Life everlasting: LUO Studio, China
- 8 November 2019
- London EMAP Publishing Limited 2019
The great mechanical maw of incalculable industry seems to open up and swallow any who gaze on the images of China’s cycle-share graveyards. After bike sharing took off in China in 2017, the market was immediately flooded with over-supply, leading to whole fields and football pitches heaped high with mangled frames or otherwise stacked with numerous cycles standing like soldiers waiting for command.
LUO Studio has devised the reuse of one of these cycles for a mobile library; styled as a beetle, its shell is formed from the sheet metal of scrapped cars. Designed for a friend of studio founder Luo Yujie, a teacher who was previously hauling his educational materials in a shopping cart, it is exemplary of the studio’s ethos of creative reuse. By no means a solution to the unthinkable excess of abandoned bikes, LUO’s attention to reuse and repurpose, to afterlife, is nevertheless crucial – and one that is all too scarce.