By Interior Design Staff
An inflatable steel sculpture by Zieta Prozessdesign brings a breath of fresh air to a site in southern Poland. Led by Oskar Zieta, 23 designers and fabricators built Nawa. "My grandfather was a blacksmith who worked with basic tools—I do similar work but with data," Zieta says.
The sculpture is comprised of 52 tons of stainless steel and 35,000,000 cubic feet of compressed air, and is 42 feet long.
Zieta Prozessdesign’s Nawa has been built on Wyspa Daliowa, along the Oder River in Poland, to help draw visitors to the small man-made island.
In the early stages, potential designs were run through simulations using a custom algorithm and Grasshopper software.
The final design is composed of 35 arches of mirror-polished stainless-steel panels, one of which was wrapped in protective film before being laser cut, welded, and inflated with compressed air into a 3-D shape, a process known as FIDU, or free inner pressure forming.
Oskar Zieta checks an arch’s finish.
The sculpture was fabricated at a former shipyard in Wroclaw, and then transported by barge to Daliowa.
There are 15 inches between each steel segment.
The arches of Wroclaw’s Cathedral of St. John the Baptist is among the inspirations for Nawa, which is Polish for nave.
Its tallest arch reaches nearly 25 feet high.
At night, LEDs uplight the sculpture.