Glass Art Project

October 2010

Prompt

Create a story of a utopia and an object "brought back" from a visit there.

Methods

Sketching, Solid Modeling, Wood Working, Working with a glassblower

Materials

Glass, Teak

Narrative

For my Utopia, I re-imagined the concept of a wall. In our world, walls are permanent, and are only crude approximations of what we really want. For example, in the wintertime, we want walls to keep out the cold, but let in sunlight. Parts of the walls are thus thick and insulated, and other parts are windows; this patchwork system of properties is a compromise to what we would really want.

Imagine a world in which one were able to enter and exit spaces without needing to walk through a door. Now imagine a type of barrier that could block some things (smell, sound) but let in others (light, people). In the wintertime, one could walk into a building without needing to let in gusts of cold air. A person whose hands are full, or someone in a wheelchair, would never need to fumble for a doorknob again. Additionally, communal workplaces become little oases for the people working there -- "good fences make good neighbors." This world is my utopia.

Process

I chose to retrieve from my utopia a device that can create these wall-less barriers. Drawing from the language of lamps, glass struck me as a logical material. I mocked up a rough idea of what I wanted and found that the nearby Bay Area Glass Institue (BAGI) has a handful of artists whom I could commission to do a piece. They connected me with Esteban Salazar, who was brave enough to take on the challenge of what I wanted

These are a couple of my original ideas. Esteban convinced me to scrap the standoff and have the pieces rest directly on the wood.

Esteban built on these ideas and made them more practical. It always helps for a designer to understand the medium you're working with. Although it would have been fun to play with color, for this piece I chose to stick with the simplicity of uncolored glass.

I insisted on coming to watch Esteban blow the glass. BAGI lives in this nondescript, warehouse-y building.

Inside there are a number of furnaces, which turns the building into one big sauna. I was glad it was a chilly day. I can't imagine being here in the summertime.

The morning of glassblowing, we finalized dimensions for the four pieces on the BAGI whiteboard. These are all rough approximations; I learned that glass is a fickle material, and controlling it is more an art than a science.

The process starts when Esteban takes some glass from the main furnace, which holds a big bowl of melted glass.

Once he's pulled out the glass that sticks to the end of this metal rod, he must spin it constantly. It's crazy! The glass never stops moving until he pops it off at the end of the process. I'm still not sure how his hands don't give out after four straight hours of glassblowing.

These are the tools he uses to shape the glass. He used the wooden spoon-like tools to shape the piece when it was small. As he filled it with air and the piece got bigger, a lot of the shaping was done with the metal tongs (underneath the blowtorch) and, surprisingly, wet folded newspaper (it's charred from use in the photo above).

Closeup of the wooden tools.

Esteban recruited fellow glassblower Morgan Chivers to assist him. After watching the two work together, I understand why you could never do glassblowing alone. In the picture above, Morgan is waiting for Esteban to signal that he should blow more air into the glass piece. Esteban shapes while Morgan blows.

Morgan also prepared the tools while Esteban was heating the glass. Here you can see him measuring out the dimensions Esteban needs to make the glass piece. My request to nest so many pieces together pushed the limits on what you can do with this type of glassmaking, with respect to how precise you can make the pieces.

This piece is almost finished. They're working together to make sure the top and bottom of the bowl are flat - you wouldn't want the bowl to sit crooked on the table.

Here Esteban is heating the piece to keep it pliable for final adjustments, and checking the piece to see if it is done. He spent a lot of time heating the pieces in the furnace (also called a glory hole). There are two different furnaces at BAGI. This is the small one, for pieces under 10" or so in diameter.

Esteban was constantly checking on the piece to make sure it was the right temperature and shape.

Here Esteban has just removed the piece, a process which involves cooling the attachment point until it's somewhat brittle, and hitting the metal pole until the piece pops off. Esteban is smoothing out the attachment point with a blowtorch, and Morgan is waiting to bring the piece over to the oven. Check out those gloves! Definitely gives you a sense for what type of heat you're dealing with.

This is the oven where the pieces anneal for a day. This means they cool down slowly in order to prevent stress from building up.

Here are those same pieces back on my desk at Stanford. For the final project, I chose my four favorite pieces that looked the best together. The piece on the far left is an extra, which I practiced my finishing technique on. You can see the difference between:

raw glass (clear)

glass that has been sand-blasted (center, very white)

finished glass that has been sand blasted and coated with water sealant (left, semi-opaque)

With all of the pieces finished, I needed to contextualize them with a story - otherwise it would just be something pretty to look at.

With the glass finished, it needed a base to sit on. I chose teak because I love the way it looks. After glueing and cutting the wood, I sanded it with more grits of paper than you can shake a stick at.

Teak oil provided the finishing touch.

Here's a box being prepared for presentation. You can see a completed one in the background, and the various cutting tools I used in the foreground.

This is the object being displayed. The pen and notebook give a sense of scale.

Here's the finished object next to its package. I decided not to use the eye/ear/hand/nose symbols on the actual object because it looks so much prettier without them there.

And this is the final piece, all by its lonesome self.