I’m Alexey Steshak and everybody says that I’m a mad decorator. I believe them because I create a really WOW projects with my own hands.
Today I’m going to show you my new project – Black Bar, Altai Republic, Russia.
It took me one year to make it, because I did everything with my own hands. I worked in different areas of art: mosaic, interior design, modelling, furniture design, woodwork, metalwork and others. I created not only the interior, but the bar story too.
We were collecting the legends about this wonderful place little by little, like a mosaic of many people`s memories, and then turned them into this story.
Once upon a time there was a small wood-smelting plant that experienced a great success and was in its heyday when an unexpected catastrophe destroyed it in a few hours. But let`s start from the beginning…
Our story began when Professor Melt, after 25 years of academic pursuits, invented a wood-melting method in 1876, which got him to the Nobel Prize later.
On the World Science Festival in Paris, where Melt gave a demonstration of his invention, he met a wealthy entrepreneur Gilbert Black.
Black was so impressed by this invention that he immediately suggested Melt to establish a wood-smelting plant.
After a few months of preparations in a small and cozy brick building located in a forest of incredible beauty the venture, that was the only one of its kind, was opened.
The main melt department was fenced off from the rest of the premises by a firm wall behind which big smelt furnaces stood (we turned them into four comfortable sofas).
In the melt department, a smelter-robot supervised the process, because the temperature inside was extremely high and unbearable for a human. Even the ceiling melted and became a part of a mirror frame.
The second room was a place where orders were taken and where employees worked. There were some desks and a few palm trees; ventilators cooled the air and a gramophone, still very rare at that time, played the music.
A small storeroom, where chemical elements used for a unique melting mixture were kept, we turned into a men’s room.
Another storeroom was located in the open air and eventually became home for many wild plants with beautiful flowers. Now this is ladies’ room.
In the sink you can see a mixer-robot prototype. We didn’t manage to restore it in its original volume as it was damage greatly by the explosion, but tried to reproduce its exterior basing on the sketches.
The catastrophe happened late at night so no one was injured. The main bleed air system burnt out because of incorrectly made mixture and this led to the explosion. The firm wall was blown off like it was a feather. The stream of burning hot air burst into the corridor, melting the door and sealing the entrance to the plant forever.
The mixer-robot became a pile of melted metal.
After numerous attempts to open the door, the plant was closed. And many decades later to unseal the premises and find out what had happened here years ago.
We were moving step by step and were founding new mysteries and their solutions.
We found the smelter-robot and linked it up to the life-support system, and if you enter a startup codes, you will have a chance to see how brilliant Professor Melt`s invention was.
We also found lots of miraculously spared pictures and carefully hung them on the walls of the bar.
The most unique one is the portrait of an unknown woman. As far as we managed to find out from different sources, this is the portrait of Professor`s sweetheart. Unfortunately, her name is seems to be lost in time.
We got into the spirit of this wonderful plant, came to love it and told you its story so that everybody feel the incredible human aspiration to discovery and experiment.
Some pictures of the process. Here’s the handmade ceiling
Lamps
Process of making wooden mirror frame
Creating birds from plaster
And this was the result
Portrait from ceramic mosaic
Building a robot sink
And here it is!
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