AQUA Bioethanol Fireplace
AQUA is a bioethanol fireplace made for Glammfire. Glammfire is a Portuguese company based in Famalicão that specialises in doing decorative fireplaces fuelled only with bioethanol. This project was made while I was still in my second year at ESAD. I hope you enjoy it.
The idea for this project came from waves. At first I didn’t know exactly how I was going to portrait the effect of movement on my piece, but after some days of thought and research I came up with the idea of using section planes. During my research I came across the Aqua Tower in Chicago, which ended up playing a very important role in the development of this project. The building itself is a masterpiece that uses section planes to recreate the effect of waves and at night displays one of the most beautiful light shows.
Having set my idea I went on to materials and manufacturing process, for the section planes I intended to use a mix of concrete with corrugated board which would make the piece light and at the same time hard and fire resistant. For the wooden rings I chose a particular type of oak that grows only in North America, the white oak tree. The process of making the rings consists in shaping a wooden tube with heat and steam, inserting it in a ring shaped cast and letting it dry so that it retains the shape.
With all this said I intended that my final product would have a minimal look.
I started by doing some research and some rough sketches. After i got my shape right I went straight to 3D modelling, I did the whole project in SolidWorks and the rendering in Keyshot. For the final presentation I used Photoshop to make thing a bit nicer.
Since this was a project for school my teachers were the ones in charge of giving me feedback. It got a mostly positive feedback in the end. I learned quite a lot from this experience, I learned how to work with certain materials and that's still helpful today.
I enjoyed my self and learned a lot while making this project. I hope you find it good and feel free to leave a comment.
It's a great design, nice changing the traditional one