More details have surfaced regarding the preview for this year’s Salone del Mobile. It seems this year the show will be honoring the work of Leonardo Da Vinci. Many brands have already adhered to echoing this Renaissance master’s ideas. This year’s edition will be celebrating DaVinci’s 500th anniversary of death. With that in […]
Milan Design Week is an event full of many great initiatives to see in the area of design and we’re having a deeper look at yet another more you can see in April. We’re talking about the Superdesign Show by Superstudio Group. This initiative is which deeply explores design and […]
Oki Sato, the founder of Nendo, has recently given us an appetizer for Milan Design Week 2019. He designed a series of cast glass chairs for Venetian brand WonderGlass, which you can see in April in Milan!
This unusual set of objects known as the Melt collection features a chair comprised of an inverted arched base topped with a contrasting, flat pane of glass, and backed with a larger rectangle of glass. Some first images have been released of this piece of furniture and it’s indeed unusual yet astonishing.
This new collection comprises a total of dozen pieces of furniture all formed by gravity over a pipe or mold. Among this glass collection, we can find an armchair, one chaise longue, a dining table, a side table, one partition, and even one vase.
The designer has stated that the main idea behind the conception of these glass figures was to let the glass to control the design process. Specifically, the designer let the glass flow by way of gravity as well as through the weight of the material.
To create the glass chair, for example, first, it was necessary to pour molten glass into a square frame, while at the same time, several craftsmen evened out the surface using iron trowels. After the glass cooled, it was then placed onto a U-shaped mold where it formed an arch through the help of the craftsmen who used tools to help the shape of that arch and make sure there were no bends or cracks. Sato himself made this comment about the project.
“I think flat surface glass stretched by the hands of craftsmen is beautiful (…) I discovered the beauty of glass when I saw that the plate-like glass created a beautiful arch by its own weight when lifted by a number of craftsmen.”
These pieces of furniture were presented for the first time at this year’s IMM Cologne trade show. WonderGlass is also set to be at Milan Design Week 2019 to show this new concept.
