Artist Burns Chairs into Decorative, Fragile Steel Ring Seats with Fire

For his thesis at Design Academy Eindhoven, artist/designer Tuomas Markunpoika Tolvanen created this incredible chair using tubular steel cut into thin rings. How did he get them to stay that way?

He burned them.

His project is called Engineering Temporality, and the inspiration came from his grandmother whose Alzheimer's disease is deteriorating her health and memories.

Once he cut the rings, he laid them over an existing chair, only partially covering it. The fire acted as a varnish, creating a bond and leaving only the rings behind. He doesn't talk about how much weight it will hold, but you can see him place a coffee cup in the cabinet he also made in the video below. But it's doubtful it will hold much weight, since it's supposed to reflect the fragility of humanity.

Visit Tolvanen's website for more information on this project.

This seems like something that could be done at home relatively easily as long as you have a safe place to burn it. The tubular steel can be purchased from most hardware stores in the form of electrical conduit or plumbing pipes. If anyone decides to try it, be sure to show us!