Rachel Harding's Corian chair is inflated "like a balloon"
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Rachel Harding's Corian chair is inflated "like a balloon" (3 min 13 sec)
Uploaded on 04-19-2017 at 03:13 PM by Olga
Furniture - General - YouTube

London designer Rachel Harding has created a balloon-like chair by inflating Corian, a solid surface material more commonly used for kitchen or bathroom countertops.

Invented by American chemical company DuPont in 1967, Corian is a very hard, non-porous and stain-resitant composite material. It is widely used in kitchens, bathrooms and even building facades.

"What a lot of people don't know about Corian is that, because it's a composite, it's actually thermoformable," Harding explains in the movie, which was filmed at a workshop outside London. "When you heat it up it, it becomes kind of like marzipan."

Corian is made from acrylic polymer and alumina trihydrate, a natural substance derived from aluminium ore.

"Often when designers use a solid surface product like Corian they just use it in its sheet form. This is really the first time that someone has actually inflated a solid surface material."

Harding worked together with Phillip Hutfield, Max Klaentschi and fabricators Cutting Edge to produce her first full-scale prototype of the inflated chair.

She used computer numerically controlled (CNC) milling to cut out two profiles from sheets of Corian, which she riveted together, heated and then inflated in a wooden jig.

"You end up with this inflated form that looks soft like a balloon, but it's got this really hard texture like granite, which I think is really exciting," she says.

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Rachel Harding's Corian chair is inflated "like a balloon"
(click here to watch and comment)