Dezeen Showroom: Polish designer Oskar Zieta of Zieta Studio has developed an ultra-light chair by welding together aluminium sheets and blowing them up as if they were balloons.
Called Ultraleggera, the seat is an answer to Italian architect Gio Ponti's Superleggera, or super-lightweight, chair from 1957, for which he stripped down a traditional Ligurian design to its bare essentials.
Above: Oskar Zieta holds the Ultraleggera. Top image: The chair can bear a load of up to 1200 kilograms
While Ponti's version is made from light yet stable ash wood and weighs 1.7 kilograms, Zieta's consists entirely of aluminium and comes in at only 1.66 kilograms.
Although this is extremely light for a chair it is more than a kilogram heavier than Massimiliano Della Monaca's Estrema chair, which weighed 0.617 kilograms and is officially the world's lightest chair.
"Over a period of several years, every radius and every perforation of the Ultraleggera chair was optimised for lightness and strength," the studio's founder Oskar Zieta told Dezeen.
"The final design is the result of material and technological optimisation, as well as strength tests ? first virtually simulated, and then carried out in the real world."
The design is also available in black
According to Zieta, the FiDU method conserves both energy and material when compared to standard production processes.
And as a mono chair, the Ultraleggera chair is made entirely from a single, fully recyclable material, ...