SundayYoungDesigner  is our design competition giving a young designer every Sunday a worldwide exposure and a chance to win 150$ worth design books 

Inside more details, pics and a cool video show the process of creating the chair 

Our 12 runner up is Tim A. Richards,  industrial design student at OCAD Toronto, Canada that sent us his Silver Ghost Chair – an handmade chair combines wood and steal  without any glue or nails.

“Experiencing this chair is all about experiencing the tree which became this chair. It’s hand-hewn seat and smooth-planed backrest expose clearly its life story written in the grain, running your hands across the sides of the seat you can feel the tree bark as it once was, and the rough split backside tells the tale of its death.

Silver Ghost started with a concept to make a chair based entirely on the history of its materials. Trees, being living organisms before they are turned into a building material, already have inherent histories written in their growth rings and figure. They are imbued with additional stories when we interact with them, often giving them great meaning and value. The specific tree that I worked with was a silver maple, felled after being damaged in an ice-storm. It’s history as a resilient urban tree can be traced through the wild figure and colouring in the no exposed faces of the wood.

Silver Ghost is hand-carved from a single log using traditional swedish axe-carving techniques, the entire chair was touched by machine only once to joint the glued faces of the seat. It was hand-sawn, hewn, planed and chiseled to its final form, needing only minimal sanding before a tung oil finish was rubbed in. The marks made by my hands in making the chair were seen as equally important to the story of the tree’s transformation as its own signs.”