Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka already has one of his glass "water block" benches permanently installed within the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, further blurring the line between furniture and art. Now, he's created part deux for another exhibition, but this time with brass.
The seat of the bench appears to ripple like the surface of a body of water, its delicate, undulating grooves belying the bench's monolithic structure. There's no doubt something beautiful and powerful about capturing the ephemerality of moving water in so solid a material.
Achieving this effect was no easy task, however. The designer and his team employed a casting technique used in the production of traditional Japanese Buddha statues, whereby brass is melted inside a 2,000-degree Fahrenheit furnace, poured into a sand mold, then sanded to brilliance by experienced craftsmen.
The brass water block bench will show at an exhibition at Kinkaku-ji, a golden pavilion Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto. Take a closer look below at how the bench was made.