what kind of afterlife can salvaged stained-glass give a burned-out porsche?
By kat barandy I designboom
Stained-glass has traditionally illuminated the solemn halls of holy spaces. On the east side of Los Angeles, Ben Tuna sees this medium in a new light. He works between the language of old windows and the weathered bodies of cars, bringing stained-glass into places where it usually has no business appearing.
Inside Glass Visions Studio, the family-run stained-glass business founded by his father Mark Tuna in 1979, the artist has built a practice that balances architectural craft and automotive ruin. Porsche shells, salvaged church glass, desert agate, and detached car doors become parts of the same world.
Ben Tuna took over his family’s studio in 2021, after years of learning the trade around restoration jobs, residential stained-glass commissions, and the physical demands of glasswork. His recent works under the Glass Cowboy name push that inheritance into areas that are more experimental.
A rusted Porsche 911 Carrera becomes Resurrection, a hollow car body fitted with cathedral-like stained glass. Burned vintage Porsches pulled from the Los Angeles fires become beautiful memorials. A more recent work, Unearthed (2026), replaces stained-glass with thin-cut agate collected from the deserts of the Southwest, giving the car body a mineral glow instead of an ecclesiastical one.
Ben Tuna fits damaged Porsche bodies with stained glass, salvaged church windows, and desert agate
Resurrection (2025) centers on a corroded Porsche 911 Carrera stripped of its wheels, windows, and interior. Tuna leaves the damage visible, treating the car’s empty openings as places for hand-cut glass panels held within custom metal frames. Across the windshield, side windows, and rear glass, figures and fragments recall cathedral windows, their colors catching light across a machine once built for speed.
The work gains its force from the tension between the car’s status and its condition. A Porsche usually carries ideas of polish, value, movement, and mechanical precision, yet this one sits still, eaten away by time. Tuna’s intervention gives the shell a different presence. The car keeps its rust and its failure, while the glass brings in color, image, and a sense of ceremony that never turns the object back into a usable vehicle.
1965 Porsche 356, lost in the LA fires (2025)
After the Los Angeles fires, Tuna began collecting burned-out Porsche shells that had been left behind in the wreckage. Beginning in March 2025, he acquired five burned vintage Porsches from the fires, with four coming from one collector’s garage in the Palisades. His first post-fire project was a 1965 Porsche 356, which became a 700-pound movable sculpture built with salvaged stained glass from decommissioned churches.
The work process carried the weight of the site it came from. Tuna and two helpers wore respirators while stripping the car down to bare metal, dealing with toxic ash and chemicals before the glasswork could begin. He used pieces from roughly fifteen salvaged stained-glass windows, many of them hand-painted in Germany in the late 1800s, and assembled them by size, color, and feeling rather than a fixed narrative.
the artist’s Los Angeles studio
In these fire works, the car is a record of heat, collapse, and private attachment. Ben Tuna once noted that he was moved by seeing cars hauled away after the fires and thinking about collectors losing objects they had spent decades gathering. The scale of the burned shells lets viewers study what fire has done, while the glass shifts the cars away from scrap and into a slower encounter with material damage.
Thus, Tuna is using an old and physically demanding craft to respond to a very current landscape of loss, salvage, and rebuilding. The glass carries its own history too, since many fragments come from decommissioned churches and forgotten windows. When he brings those pieces into a burned Porsche, two design legacies meet inside one object: the handmade window and the engineered car body.
A post shared by BƎN TUNA | glass artist (@glasscowboyy)
Ben Tuna’s practice has also started moving beyond stained glass as the only material language. In Unearthed (2026), he uses thin slices of agate collected from the deserts of the Southwest, fitting the mineral pieces into the car body like geologic windows. The shift changes the tone of the work. Where the church glass brings figures, color fields, and old devotional imagery, the agate brings banded stone, desert color, and a deeper sense of time held inside the material itself.
His door works extend the same thinking at a smaller scale. Detached Porsche doors become wall pieces, with the car reduced to a fragment that can hang like a window, panel, or relief. Removed from the full vehicle, the door keeps the curve, handle, and memory of motion, while the glass or stone turns it into a surface for looking. It is a smart move for the practice, because it lets the language of the cars travel beyond the full chassis and into interiors without losing the charge of the original object.
‘best door I’ve seen in the wild.’ | image courtesy Ben Tuna
This article was originally published by Designboom.