Tomoko Azumi, Rie Isono, Norico Katayama and lighting designer Hiroe Tanita are showing an indoor rock climbing wall system they developed together at a showroom known as Design Tide for Tokyo’s design week. Together, they’ve made one of the coolest climbing wall style installations I’ve ever seen. Their shapes evoke natural images, trees, leaves, etc. These wall coverings do triple duty, as art, coat rack, and rock climbing holds.

It makes me really think about the state of rock climbing. For indoor climbing walls, one of the big problems is that people always use bold colored tape to indicate routes. Introducing lights is one idea, then to transmit by radio to each hold and only your route would light up. Sadly, L.E.D.’s in a polyester handhold just looks odd and creepy, not at all friendly.

To make a really friendly rock wall, that meets with an earthy friendly feel, why don’t they stay with the Design Tide aesthetic and making each route, a different type of natural formation. One route could be water forms, (think waterfall meets dropping a rock into a pond and the resulting splash). The next route could be the trees shown above Then you could have rocks, and then small shrubberies sticking out of the wall (who doesn’t want to mantle off some broccoli?!)

I hope that this little group can bring these to full production and let us know when they’re available! Better yet, they need to call Metolius, Pusher, Franklin, or Nicros to license and build these wonderful shapes.

That reminds me,, time to go back to the rock gym! The hockey doesn’t seem to be cutting it!

Thanks to Pingmag’s article about Tokyo Design week (and the linking hint from the great people at NotCot)

Links: www.Notcot.org and PingMag