Spirit | Glass Chair
Year: 2020
Spirit is a glass chair made by a process called as Glass Slumping. The chair reminisces the pioneering design of Cini Boeri’s Ghost chair which is a design icon since 1987. This project gave me an opportunity to learn to create realistic glass shaders in Blender and create fake dispersion and caustics. It is also part of a series of personal projects I do to improve my surfacing skills, create advanced materials in Blender (following an online course by Mr. Joakim Tormhill), learn manufacturing techniques and thus create pragmatic designs.
To slump glass means to allow it to sink into shape. When a sheet of glass is placed over a refractory mould in a kiln and heated to 630C, the glass - under its own weight - relaxes enough to sag into a shape that becomes permanent when cooled. Almost like draping a cloth over an object. Depending on the complexity of the surface, manual assistance may be needed. The apparent simplicity of the process is complemented by the sophisticated technology that makes it possible to work with such a sensitive material.
