Emerged as a large-sized instrument for exhibition didactics, the Sistema Lupo has been extended and now has a home and digital version.
News in La Voz de Galicia
Autor: Javier Becerra
Location: A Coruña/la voz
Date of release: 9/1/2011
Fermín Blanco‘s architectural firm is not a typical studio. In addition to the computers, the giant printers and the aroma of order and perfection of the guild, there is a playful atmosphere. In fact, in his office you can see Lego boxes, a giant Vespa scooter made with pieces of polystyrene, sculptures identical to those of Chillida in wood and a thousand and one gadgets that denote that this space is something special.
The reason for all this is to be found in the Lupo System, the construction set that Blanco launched in 2007 with a clear objective. We wanted to do didactics of architectural and engineering exhibitions,” he recalls. In these cases, the easiest thing to do is to build. You explain everything by building. But, be careful, you need an imperfect toy, one that if you put weights or loads on it, it will give way. If you attach everything well, it’s only good for making shapes. I wanted to teach basic structures intuitively, to put loads on the bridges, to make them yield, and so on.
With these premises, the first version of the game was born, in large size and with pieces of porexpan. “Initially it was only for didactics,” insists Blanco, “but little by little, we were called for other things that we could not foresee. He says this at the Dominicos school pavilion, where, as part of the Christmas activities, a group of skaters spent an afternoon building and knocking down walls with their system. “It’s combining psychomotor skills with the construction theme. We get called for other things, like activities for the blind, for heritage interpretation, and so on.”
Among his work stands out the commission they had from the Chillida Leku Museum: “We did a work of interpretation of the sculptures and even made a special version of the small wooden Sistema Lupo”.
“People who buy it send us pictures of the figures they make and they are amazing.”
So far, Fermín has developed three versions of the Sistema Lupo. The large-scale Ecolupo and digital Lupo, on which they are currently working. For convenience, the most popular is Ecolupo, which can be purchased for domestic use. “It’s actually a scaled-down version of the big one. There are 30 pieces with seven different geometries and we include some guides to make figures,” explains Blanco, who confesses to having spent a childhood glued to Tente and construction games: “Of course, I played Tente, Meccano, Lego and all the wooden toys my grandfather made for me. All of us architects liked it.
The projection that Ecolupo has had through social networks has generated a curious rebound effect: “People who buy it send us photos of the figures they make outside our guides and they are very surprising, in many cases much better than the ones we proposed”.
