A London and São Paulo-based design studio has taken trash, and turned it into treasure. Studio Swine, a collaboration of Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves was able to create a portable aluminum smelter to turn discarded cans into raw building material. They dubbed the project “Can City.”
Using their furnace, they’ve constructed furniture with a “vernacular aesthetic, providing a portrait of the streets,” as they put it on their Behance project page.
The whole operation is made from reclaimed parts–a beer keg, dolly and leaf blower–and runs off a car battery and used cooking oil.
Molten aluminum is casted into sand molds that Groves created by depressing found objects into the surface of the sand.
The team says the project, which was financed by Heineken and exhibited in the Coletivo Amor de Madre Gallery in São Paulo in March, ”suggests a future possibility where Catadores (waste collectors) can adopt this system to make use of free metal and free fuel to produce an infinite range of individually crafted aluminum items.”
