A Truckbicycle (right) and different foldable cycles

Musée des Arts et Métiers is one of those strange little museums that encompass the universe. When it was founded in 1794 by Abbé Grégoire, the conservatory decided to create a place « for new and useful machines ». Thus the museum was started. And you can discover there all year round, the camera of the Lumière brothers, the plane Blériot X1, on which Louis Blériot crossed the channel in 1909 and Pascal’s arithmetic machine. Another aeroplane, that of Clément Ader.

A “pleated” lamp created by Issey Miyake

A 3D xerox of your own skull can be made by Les Sismo

There are four periods in the museum, before 1750, and then one per century until after 1950. Energy, transports, constrution, mechanics and scientific instruments are all represented in fascinating galleries. But what brought me there this time, is a short exhibition where bicycles meet an Issey Miyake lamp, and Papin’s steam cooker leads to wifi connected ones.

The Mine Kafon detonates mines in Afghanistan and rolls on wind energy. In front, Ron Arad’s aluminum armchair.

Very impressive is the « Mine Kafon » created by Afghan designer Massoud Hassani : this large ball moved by wind energy, weighs 70 kilos and is made of bambou and biodegradable plastic. It rolls in the desert and destroys mines on its way, lead by a small GPS. Another amazing item is a skull made from a 3D printing machine by Les Sismo. You can have one made of your head for 4 000 to 5 000 €. Also a series of typewriters starting with a German “computer” writing with a pen, created in 1928. In the first room, a camioncyclette (truckbicycle) was very amusing as well the aluminum armchair « Uncut » by Ron Arad lent by the Museum of Modern Art.

Designer Antoine Fenoglio had the idea for this exhibition. Behind him flat LED lights

Antoine Fenoglio and Frédéric Lecourt, the two designers of the show, wanted to explain how daily objects we don’t notice anymore, have a particular poetry and genius to themselves.  “Designers use the vocabulary of inventions and explain them to the greater public ». For someone as unscientific as myself, it feels good to understand what we live with everyday ! (Musée des Arts et Métiers is very near the Pompidou center)