Spring 2013 / Issue 130
One student in the class said designing with computer software instead of at the bench broke through a technical predictability of the material. "With the modeling program we use, called 4-D, you can play with scale, distort shapes, change curves, twist and play with form," says Jin Won Han, a South Korean native who completed coursework for her M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003. Working on the laptop, Han designed multiple shapes that she assembled to create the piece Exile. Later, she blew the complex form in glass in less than half the time it would have taken to work out the structure at the bench.
The course was the brainchild of Pilchuck artistic director Ruth King and grew from her research project in the mid-1990s to study how software could be incorporated into the glassblowing process. "Somewhere along the line, glassblowers started to feel that they should be able to pick and choose from everything, and that it had to all be right there in the hot shop," says King. "The idea of planning and conserving resources needs to become a more fundamental issue."
Modeling, whether on the computer or in clay or drawing, is just one way glassblowers are trying make what they do in front of the furnace more efficient. Deborah Czeresko, a New York-based sculptor and glassblower, says she is now doing more pre-blowing studies in modeling clay to cut down on her experimentation time while at UrbanGlass, where studio rates have risen in each of the past three years as they have at many public-access glassblowing facilities such as Public Glass in San Francisco. "It's not just the expense," she says. "I’ve also been thinking about the environmental impact of glassblowing, and I do what I can to limit that."
At Pilchuck, Czeresko co-taught a course with Jim Butler, chair of the studio art department at Middlebury College, in Middlebury, Vermont, called "City of Your Dreams" that asked students to design the perfect city if glass were available as a building material at no cost. Scale models of these forms were then blown. Czeresko was struck by the environmental awareness of young glassblowing students, who not only discussed how green their city would be, but were quick to ask questions about the efficiency of Pilchuck's brand-new furnaces, the first at the school to use recuperators, a system that recovers and reuses heat that would otherwise go out the chimney. "We're on the cusp of a new generation that is green," says Czeresko. "But we're not green yet."
Rethinking Business-as-Usual
Rising fuel costs and a growing consensus that global warming is a real threat have set the stage for fresh approaches in a field that is quite possibly the most energy-intensive medium for the creation of art. And it’s not just happening at Pilchuck.
At the 2007 Glass Art Society conference in Pittsburgh, a panel organized by glassblower Julie Conway of Santa Fe presented firsthand accounts by energy-saving innovators taking novel approaches to studio and equipment design. Conway, founder of a group called BioGlass, has sounded the call for greater collaboration and cooperation to offset spiraling energy costs, which she feels could imperil the use of glass as a medium for contemporary art. Conway has created a web site (www.bioglass.org) in an effort to unite those doing cutting-edge work and to accelerate the pace of change. The site features email addresses, random glass-related photos, and links to the web sites of studios and businesses. Like many volunteer efforts, the site could be better organized and more frequently updated. Still, Conway deserves credit for assembling some of the leading innovators in the field, such as Eddie Bernard (whose glory hole design, pictured at top left, features a thermostat-controlled variable-speed blower that uses far less electricity), Hugh Jenkins, and Lori Beck, to present at the well-attended BioGlass panel in Pittsburgh. These are just a few of the individuals leading the charge toward a more efficient approach to Studio Glass.
Building on the work of pioneers such as Durk Valkema in the Netherlands and Charlie Correll and Dudley Giberson in the United States, a new generation of furnace designers are refining the design of their gas-fired equipment, squeezing more usable heat from less energy by using new technology and raising the level of engineering and design for the small glass studio. Others are switching to electric furnaces, or turning to alternative fuels to cut costs and the environmental impact of their art. Still others are re-melting recycled glass to cut down on landfill waste and hazardous off-gasses, and to save on energy and furnace wear-and-tear. The common thread to all of these efforts is a willingness to reconsider the approaches that have become business-as-usual in a movement that came of age in an era of cheap energy.
The Downside of DIY
In June 1964, Harvey Littleton made his way to the First World Congress of Craftsmen at Columbia University in New York City. In the back of his Volkswagen minibus was a small furnace made by Dominick Labino, the Johns Manville executive who provided the technical know-how that made Littleton's vision of a Studio Glass revolution possible. Labino provided the glass marbles that were used during the landmark Toledo Museum of Art workshop in 1962, and suggested some key modifications to the furnace that made it possible to blow glass successfully. His new furnace was a breakthrough design that translated the basics of a factory furnace into a miniaturized and simplified form. But while factories had access to industrial-grade components to build their furnaces, the Labino furnace relied on the ingenious use of readily available components such as inch-and-a-half black iron pipe, a simple air blower, and bricks. Labino had found a way to crudely mix air and natural gas in proper proportion to melt glass. Little more than a square stack of bricks in a metal frame with a pipe stuck through a brick as the burner, the Labino furnace became the talk of the World Congress of Craftsmen, where it was hooked up to a tank of propane and set up on the patio. A crowd gathered to watch hot glass demonstrations by such pioneers as Littleton, Erwin Eisch, and Marvin Lipofsky. "Harvey introduced the world to glass," remembers Lipofsky.
Just one example of the event’s worldwide impact comes from furnace-efficiency guru Durk Valkema. His father, Sybren Valkema, attended as a representative of the Dutch Ministry of Culture. Already teaching at a glass factory in Holland, the elder Valkema was transfixed by the sight of the small furnace, says his son, and immediately grasped its significance. Using the many photographs of Labino's design he brought back from his trip, factory technicians at the glass factory where Sybren Valkema worked built and installed a similar furnace at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.
However, it didn't take long for the academy’s noisy and inefficient furnace to be completely redesigned by the younger Valkema. A student at the academy, Durk Valkema had already helped rebuild the furnace several times and had become familiar with its design--which he called a "Bunsen burner" for its primitive mix of gas and air that was burned at the end of the pipe. The furnace was extremely unpopular with the administration. "The glass program was frowned upon because of the energy consumption," says Durk Valkema. His 1972 redesign, based on research he did with contacts in industry, was possibly the first glass furnace in the world to use the Tempest burner, a nozzle-mix industrial burner made in the United States that continues to be used in some glass studios 35 years later. The results of Valkema's changes were immediate. "For the first time we were able to really control the furnace temperature very accurately, and have an incredibly quiet and stable flame," he says. "It was much different from the incredible roar to which we had been accustomed." The biggest difference, though, was in the Gerrit Rietveld Academie's energy bill.
Universities Foot the Bill
Back in the United States, things took a different path. Whether it was the lower cost of energy in the U.S. or the rapid spread of glass programs at universities that did not watch their utility bills very closely, little attention was paid to fuel usage. As universities competed to hire Littleton's students, the Labino furnace, and its simple engineering, became the standard. Usually built by the instructors, themselves recent graduates, with the help of students only a few years younger than themselves, none of the early-generation furnaces would win any awards for quality construction or efficiency. The building of the furnace, usually in or near the ceramics department, was a rite of passage, a true roll-up-your-sleeves-and-do-it-yourself moment that was an important part of the Studio Glass ethos.
"You didn’t take something off the shelf, and make art," remembers Henry Halem, who worked as Harvey Littleton's studio assistant at University of Wisconsin before he was hired away to lead the glass program at Kent State University. "You really bonded in the building of these things; the excitement was very frenetic. It was a real alchemy. It was reinventing the wheel without knowing the wheel really existed."
While the furnace-building ritual may have been a great exercise in team building, and empowering for the students who participated in it, little attention was paid to energy conservation. With universities unaware of or unconcerned about their energy bills, the only thing that mattered was that these furnaces worked.
"In those days, we didn’t worry at all about efficiency," says Halem. "We didn't know how to spell the word. It was not on the radar screen because we weren't paying for it." Until the day he retired from Kent State in 1998, Halem often fretted about the arrival of a gas bill. "I was very nervous," he says. "I felt one day the university is going to read its gas bill, and we’re going to be screwed." Because the university had a contract with the gas company to pay a lump sum each year, however, that bill never materialized.
Howard Ben Tre, a sculptor in cast glass who attended RISD in the late 1970s, says that if energy costs had been what they are today, the Studio Glass movement probably wouldn’t have happened. "It was part of the same phenomenon that was happening in ceramics--of taking an industrial process and reclaiming it," says Ben Tre. "Before the glass movement, people in ceramics not only wanted to make their own mug, they wanted to dig the clay, build the kiln, express their individuality and power as human beings. That was the same thing for Studio Glass."
"The goal in those days was to blow glass, and not build equipment," says Fred Metz, principal at Spiral Arts, which now focuses on glassblowing tools but remains one of the premier furnace builders. "The old-school equipment was the most direct route to hot glass ... and it did allow [Studio Glass] to spread quickly. We owe a lot to that aesthetic; it was friendly and said, You can do this." Still, precious little attention was paid to construction quality, and fire-safety systems in those early years were a serious liability. In the mid-1990s, Metz began to research national and local fire and safety codes and incorporate higher-level safety systems as insurance companies tightened the rules. But Metz recognizes that the field was not ready for those systems when it began. "If all you could have built were furnaces that had combustion-control panels that cost $7,000, and they had to keep the cost below $1,000 to build the entire furnace, then all that happened might never have happened."
What did happen was that furnace-building knowledge was shared through workshops, studio visits, and mimeographed, handwritten manuals. Eventually, Halem would compile the information from his own notes and others to publish Glass Notes, a folksy, do-it-yourself guide to studio building now in its fourth edition. Significantly, it is only in the new edition, published in 2006, that new chapters have appeared on furnace technologies such as heat reclamation, in recognition of the concepts of energy saving and environmentalism which were simply not a part of the equation early on.
"In the 1970s, we thought environmentalism meant 'Save the Whales,'" says Halem. "Never in my mind was anything about what our furnaces were pumping into the atmosphere. It was the smokestacks from industry that we were worried about."
Glass’s Massive Carbon Footprint
While university-based glassblowers may have thought little about energy costs, glassblowers who built their own studies and received monthly gas bills were keenly aware of the energy-intensive nature of their work. Dudley Giberson, who graduated from RISD with a ceramics degree in 1967, set out to blow glass at his own private studio. "My only exposure was through my professor Norman Schulman, who had made the burner system for the glass furnace at the first Toledo Workshop," says Giberson. In the 1970s, Giberson's design for a ceramic burner that ran more quietly and more efficiently than the Labino burner began to draw visitors to his studio in Warner, New Hampshire. In 1977, Giberson began to distribute the Joppa Glassworks catalog to share some of the technical knowledge he had gained; his hand-lettered pamphlet was as much a philosophical treatise as a studio-building manual. It is one of the earliest documented discussions about fuel conservation. "Who has ever said 'No, I won’t turn the furnace up 'cause the children will need oil to heat their houses when they grow up...?'" he asked in a chapter called "Thoughts on Fuel Conservation, Efficiency, and Fuel Economy."
"I didn't have a school backing me up, paying the fuel bills, or giving me a salary," says Giberson, who acknowledges that if all glassblowers had faced such limitations, Studio Glass might never have developed the way it did. "I don’t think glass would have gone nearly as far just based on people like myself."
What Giberson sensed in his early writings about energy conservation went beyond simple economics. He was beginning to question the amount of energy needed to blow glass. A lonely voice in an era of cheap energy and ignorance about global warming, Giberson's concerns were ahead of their time. In our current era of environmental awareness, driven by the very real effects of climate change, the issue of fuel conservation has been refocused on how much carbon each person is adding to the atmosphere. For a glassblowing studio, the amount can be considerable.
Figuring your carbon footprint is a simple equation. Multiply the therms listed on your gas bill by 12.0593. That is the number of pounds of carbon dioxide that is emitted as a result of burning one therm of natural gas. Then divide this sum by 2,205 to convert it into metric tons. A single metric ton of CO2 is what a car emits in about two months of driving, says Lisa A. Moore, a scientist with Environmental Defense. While equivalents vary, there is no question that glass studios contribute significant amounts of carbon to the atmosphere, a single large studio easily releasing the same amount of carbon as over 100 households. With two 1,000-pound day tanks, and seven glory holes, a public-access glass studio could easily produce 480 metric tons of carbon per year, or the equivalent annual output of approximately 70 cars, and that does not include the carbon generated by the use of electric annealers and other equipment.
What are the implications of these numbers? How does a glassblower respond?
Whether driven by an ethical imperative, or economic survival in the face of rising energy costs, glassblowers have never had as much incentive to reexamine the way they approach their art as they do today. And across the world of glass, that reexamination is starting to happen.
Cutting Carbon
New York-based artist Jamie Harris has dropped his lower-priced production line and uses his studio time to make one-of-a-kind work only. Fabricator and sculptor John Lewis, based in Oakland, California, installed a state-of-the-art recuperator on the industrial-sized furnace he uses for casting, and slashed his fuel bill (and carbon output) by a third. Andi Kovell and Justin Parker of Esque Studio in Portland, Oregon, have found that their environmentally sensitive approach to glassmaking--using recycled glass, electric furnaces running on wind energy provided by the local utility, and biodegradable packaging--have translated into greater sales for the retailers who buy their production lines. "In the past, the only eco-friendly products available had a decidedly hippie aesthetic to them," says Kovell. "Today, people in every income bracket can feel comfort in the products available to them as honoring their own commitments to our environment."
Whether it’s a complete reconsideration of one’s approach to glass, or simply taking small steps now that may lead to bigger ones later, the key is to take action to reduce the environmental impact of glass as a medium for contemporary art. "I would hate to see a world where there wasn't glassblowing," says Bill Chameides, chief scientist for Environmental Defense, an advocacy group that has been supporting innovative and practical solutions to environmental issues since 1967. "Having said that, in all professions, it’s possible to carefully look at what you’re doing and look for ways to decrease your carbon footprint.... The most important thing is to not throw your hands up and say you can't do it."
From hiring an outside firm, to analyzing the ways in which your studio might save money and cut its use of fuel, to engaging in a dialogue with other glassblowers about their best practices, every glassblower should be considering how to lower their energy usage and, by extension, their carbon footprint. Because melting larger amounts of glass in one tank requires less energy than many smaller tanks, Eddie Bernard of Wet Dog Glass urges private studio owners to consider teaming up with other area glassblowers to share a facility, or to consider working at public-access facilities to cut costs and lower their impact on the environment.
Larger facilities also have access to higher levels of quality in engineering and design. Despite all the advances, the small market for glassblower studio equipment has meant that small-studio equipment still means hand-built, one-off furnaces that are only as good as the person building them and later operating them. Contrast that with industry, where teams of engineers study ways to optimize efficiency, and highly trained facility managers operate furnaces at peak performance. For years, industrial glass facilities have been using a high percentage of recycled glass, large electric furnaces instead of gas-fired furnaces, and heat recuperators, all of which are considered cutting-edge in the Studio Glass world.
Regulation Likely to Raise Prices
Further incentives to cut energy usage might be coming in the form of government programs to limit the levels of carbon produced in the United States. Instead of a carbon tax, Chameides thinks a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, similar to what has been done to limit acid rain by controlling sulphur emissions, could come into effect in the next few years. This would work by setting limits on the power utilities and refineries to regulate how much carbon they could release in a given year. Those who managed to stay under their quota, or "cap," would be allowed to sell or "trade" their unused allowances to producers unable to meet their carbon limits. This is a highly efficient, market-based system has been shown to be highly effective in the case of controlling acid rain. But one thing is almost certain: prices may be affected. "There will be some increase," says Chameides. "It will not be entirely painless to transition to the low-carbon economy."
But the expense of producing glass has always been, throughout history, a part of the equation. Glass producers, whether they were factories or artists’ studios, have had to find ways to survive when energy became more expensive, or the industry had to adapt to a new fuel or technology. "Glass making is a very expensive undertaking due to the high cost of fuel and raw materials, and always has been," says Jutta-Annette Page, curator of glass at the Toledo Museum of Glass. "This is because energy is a particularly costly resource, no matter what kind of fuel you are talking about." Central European glass production during the medieval and early renaissance periods took place in temporary glassblowing facilities that would be moved when huge swaths of forest had been cut and burned to feed the fires. When the King of England needed wood to build naval vessels in the 17th century and set bans on the use of wood fuel to make glass, many glassworks closed down, according to Page. Those continuing on began using coal, and the new technology associated with it ushered in a new era of glassblowing. Throughout history, the ebb and flow of fuel costs and availability have driven change and innovation.
As the Studio Glass movement begins to take a closer look at how to adapt to changing landscape of energy, there is solace in the historical evidence that the allure of glass has always been strong enough to spur new discoveries so that glass production can survive and thrive for a new generation.
ANDREW PAGE is the editor in chief of GLASS: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly.
NOTE: The print version of this article includes profiles of four innovative artists pursuing energy efficiency in their glass studios. To read about Simon Pearce's electric waterfall, Lori Beck's landfill dream, Christian Thornton's recycling plant, and Hugh Jenkins's deep fryer, order the FALL 2007 edition (GLASS #108) by emailing info@glassquarterly.com or dialing toll-free: 800.607.4410.
Can Glass Go Green?
by Andrew Page
This past July, students in an advanced class at Pilchuck teased glass into new sculptural form under the watchful eyes of two instructors. Unlike their fellow students turning pipes in the hot shop each morning, the ten glassblowers enrolled in "Mind Meets Matter" spent the first part of each day tapping away at laptop computers, coached by instructor Ken Rinaldo, a multimedia artist who is director of the art and robotics program at Ohio State University. In the afternoon they would go on to blow actual glass in a studio session led by glassblower Joe Cariati, a professor at California State University, Fullerton.
by Andrew Page
One student in the class said designing with computer software instead of at the bench broke through a technical predictability of the material. "With the modeling program we use, called 4-D, you can play with scale, distort shapes, change curves, twist and play with form," says Jin Won Han, a South Korean native who completed coursework for her M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003. Working on the laptop, Han designed multiple shapes that she assembled to create the piece Exile. Later, she blew the complex form in glass in less than half the time it would have taken to work out the structure at the bench.
The course was the brainchild of Pilchuck artistic director Ruth King and grew from her research project in the mid-1990s to study how software could be incorporated into the glassblowing process. "Somewhere along the line, glassblowers started to feel that they should be able to pick and choose from everything, and that it had to all be right there in the hot shop," says King. "The idea of planning and conserving resources needs to become a more fundamental issue."
Modeling, whether on the computer or in clay or drawing, is just one way glassblowers are trying make what they do in front of the furnace more efficient. Deborah Czeresko, a New York-based sculptor and glassblower, says she is now doing more pre-blowing studies in modeling clay to cut down on her experimentation time while at UrbanGlass, where studio rates have risen in each of the past three years as they have at many public-access glassblowing facilities such as Public Glass in San Francisco. "It's not just the expense," she says. "I’ve also been thinking about the environmental impact of glassblowing, and I do what I can to limit that."
At Pilchuck, Czeresko co-taught a course with Jim Butler, chair of the studio art department at Middlebury College, in Middlebury, Vermont, called "City of Your Dreams" that asked students to design the perfect city if glass were available as a building material at no cost. Scale models of these forms were then blown. Czeresko was struck by the environmental awareness of young glassblowing students, who not only discussed how green their city would be, but were quick to ask questions about the efficiency of Pilchuck's brand-new furnaces, the first at the school to use recuperators, a system that recovers and reuses heat that would otherwise go out the chimney. "We're on the cusp of a new generation that is green," says Czeresko. "But we're not green yet."
Rethinking Business-as-Usual
Rising fuel costs and a growing consensus that global warming is a real threat have set the stage for fresh approaches in a field that is quite possibly the most energy-intensive medium for the creation of art. And it’s not just happening at Pilchuck.
At the 2007 Glass Art Society conference in Pittsburgh, a panel organized by glassblower Julie Conway of Santa Fe presented firsthand accounts by energy-saving innovators taking novel approaches to studio and equipment design. Conway, founder of a group called BioGlass, has sounded the call for greater collaboration and cooperation to offset spiraling energy costs, which she feels could imperil the use of glass as a medium for contemporary art. Conway has created a web site (www.bioglass.org) in an effort to unite those doing cutting-edge work and to accelerate the pace of change. The site features email addresses, random glass-related photos, and links to the web sites of studios and businesses. Like many volunteer efforts, the site could be better organized and more frequently updated. Still, Conway deserves credit for assembling some of the leading innovators in the field, such as Eddie Bernard (whose glory hole design, pictured at top left, features a thermostat-controlled variable-speed blower that uses far less electricity), Hugh Jenkins, and Lori Beck, to present at the well-attended BioGlass panel in Pittsburgh. These are just a few of the individuals leading the charge toward a more efficient approach to Studio Glass.
Building on the work of pioneers such as Durk Valkema in the Netherlands and Charlie Correll and Dudley Giberson in the United States, a new generation of furnace designers are refining the design of their gas-fired equipment, squeezing more usable heat from less energy by using new technology and raising the level of engineering and design for the small glass studio. Others are switching to electric furnaces, or turning to alternative fuels to cut costs and the environmental impact of their art. Still others are re-melting recycled glass to cut down on landfill waste and hazardous off-gasses, and to save on energy and furnace wear-and-tear. The common thread to all of these efforts is a willingness to reconsider the approaches that have become business-as-usual in a movement that came of age in an era of cheap energy.
The Downside of DIY
In June 1964, Harvey Littleton made his way to the First World Congress of Craftsmen at Columbia University in New York City. In the back of his Volkswagen minibus was a small furnace made by Dominick Labino, the Johns Manville executive who provided the technical know-how that made Littleton's vision of a Studio Glass revolution possible. Labino provided the glass marbles that were used during the landmark Toledo Museum of Art workshop in 1962, and suggested some key modifications to the furnace that made it possible to blow glass successfully. His new furnace was a breakthrough design that translated the basics of a factory furnace into a miniaturized and simplified form. But while factories had access to industrial-grade components to build their furnaces, the Labino furnace relied on the ingenious use of readily available components such as inch-and-a-half black iron pipe, a simple air blower, and bricks. Labino had found a way to crudely mix air and natural gas in proper proportion to melt glass. Little more than a square stack of bricks in a metal frame with a pipe stuck through a brick as the burner, the Labino furnace became the talk of the World Congress of Craftsmen, where it was hooked up to a tank of propane and set up on the patio. A crowd gathered to watch hot glass demonstrations by such pioneers as Littleton, Erwin Eisch, and Marvin Lipofsky. "Harvey introduced the world to glass," remembers Lipofsky.
Just one example of the event’s worldwide impact comes from furnace-efficiency guru Durk Valkema. His father, Sybren Valkema, attended as a representative of the Dutch Ministry of Culture. Already teaching at a glass factory in Holland, the elder Valkema was transfixed by the sight of the small furnace, says his son, and immediately grasped its significance. Using the many photographs of Labino's design he brought back from his trip, factory technicians at the glass factory where Sybren Valkema worked built and installed a similar furnace at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.
However, it didn't take long for the academy’s noisy and inefficient furnace to be completely redesigned by the younger Valkema. A student at the academy, Durk Valkema had already helped rebuild the furnace several times and had become familiar with its design--which he called a "Bunsen burner" for its primitive mix of gas and air that was burned at the end of the pipe. The furnace was extremely unpopular with the administration. "The glass program was frowned upon because of the energy consumption," says Durk Valkema. His 1972 redesign, based on research he did with contacts in industry, was possibly the first glass furnace in the world to use the Tempest burner, a nozzle-mix industrial burner made in the United States that continues to be used in some glass studios 35 years later. The results of Valkema's changes were immediate. "For the first time we were able to really control the furnace temperature very accurately, and have an incredibly quiet and stable flame," he says. "It was much different from the incredible roar to which we had been accustomed." The biggest difference, though, was in the Gerrit Rietveld Academie's energy bill.
Universities Foot the Bill
Back in the United States, things took a different path. Whether it was the lower cost of energy in the U.S. or the rapid spread of glass programs at universities that did not watch their utility bills very closely, little attention was paid to fuel usage. As universities competed to hire Littleton's students, the Labino furnace, and its simple engineering, became the standard. Usually built by the instructors, themselves recent graduates, with the help of students only a few years younger than themselves, none of the early-generation furnaces would win any awards for quality construction or efficiency. The building of the furnace, usually in or near the ceramics department, was a rite of passage, a true roll-up-your-sleeves-and-do-it-yourself moment that was an important part of the Studio Glass ethos.
"You didn’t take something off the shelf, and make art," remembers Henry Halem, who worked as Harvey Littleton's studio assistant at University of Wisconsin before he was hired away to lead the glass program at Kent State University. "You really bonded in the building of these things; the excitement was very frenetic. It was a real alchemy. It was reinventing the wheel without knowing the wheel really existed."
While the furnace-building ritual may have been a great exercise in team building, and empowering for the students who participated in it, little attention was paid to energy conservation. With universities unaware of or unconcerned about their energy bills, the only thing that mattered was that these furnaces worked.
"In those days, we didn’t worry at all about efficiency," says Halem. "We didn't know how to spell the word. It was not on the radar screen because we weren't paying for it." Until the day he retired from Kent State in 1998, Halem often fretted about the arrival of a gas bill. "I was very nervous," he says. "I felt one day the university is going to read its gas bill, and we’re going to be screwed." Because the university had a contract with the gas company to pay a lump sum each year, however, that bill never materialized.
Howard Ben Tre, a sculptor in cast glass who attended RISD in the late 1970s, says that if energy costs had been what they are today, the Studio Glass movement probably wouldn’t have happened. "It was part of the same phenomenon that was happening in ceramics--of taking an industrial process and reclaiming it," says Ben Tre. "Before the glass movement, people in ceramics not only wanted to make their own mug, they wanted to dig the clay, build the kiln, express their individuality and power as human beings. That was the same thing for Studio Glass."
"The goal in those days was to blow glass, and not build equipment," says Fred Metz, principal at Spiral Arts, which now focuses on glassblowing tools but remains one of the premier furnace builders. "The old-school equipment was the most direct route to hot glass ... and it did allow [Studio Glass] to spread quickly. We owe a lot to that aesthetic; it was friendly and said, You can do this." Still, precious little attention was paid to construction quality, and fire-safety systems in those early years were a serious liability. In the mid-1990s, Metz began to research national and local fire and safety codes and incorporate higher-level safety systems as insurance companies tightened the rules. But Metz recognizes that the field was not ready for those systems when it began. "If all you could have built were furnaces that had combustion-control panels that cost $7,000, and they had to keep the cost below $1,000 to build the entire furnace, then all that happened might never have happened."
What did happen was that furnace-building knowledge was shared through workshops, studio visits, and mimeographed, handwritten manuals. Eventually, Halem would compile the information from his own notes and others to publish Glass Notes, a folksy, do-it-yourself guide to studio building now in its fourth edition. Significantly, it is only in the new edition, published in 2006, that new chapters have appeared on furnace technologies such as heat reclamation, in recognition of the concepts of energy saving and environmentalism which were simply not a part of the equation early on.
"In the 1970s, we thought environmentalism meant 'Save the Whales,'" says Halem. "Never in my mind was anything about what our furnaces were pumping into the atmosphere. It was the smokestacks from industry that we were worried about."
Glass’s Massive Carbon Footprint
While university-based glassblowers may have thought little about energy costs, glassblowers who built their own studies and received monthly gas bills were keenly aware of the energy-intensive nature of their work. Dudley Giberson, who graduated from RISD with a ceramics degree in 1967, set out to blow glass at his own private studio. "My only exposure was through my professor Norman Schulman, who had made the burner system for the glass furnace at the first Toledo Workshop," says Giberson. In the 1970s, Giberson's design for a ceramic burner that ran more quietly and more efficiently than the Labino burner began to draw visitors to his studio in Warner, New Hampshire. In 1977, Giberson began to distribute the Joppa Glassworks catalog to share some of the technical knowledge he had gained; his hand-lettered pamphlet was as much a philosophical treatise as a studio-building manual. It is one of the earliest documented discussions about fuel conservation. "Who has ever said 'No, I won’t turn the furnace up 'cause the children will need oil to heat their houses when they grow up...?'" he asked in a chapter called "Thoughts on Fuel Conservation, Efficiency, and Fuel Economy."
"I didn't have a school backing me up, paying the fuel bills, or giving me a salary," says Giberson, who acknowledges that if all glassblowers had faced such limitations, Studio Glass might never have developed the way it did. "I don’t think glass would have gone nearly as far just based on people like myself."
What Giberson sensed in his early writings about energy conservation went beyond simple economics. He was beginning to question the amount of energy needed to blow glass. A lonely voice in an era of cheap energy and ignorance about global warming, Giberson's concerns were ahead of their time. In our current era of environmental awareness, driven by the very real effects of climate change, the issue of fuel conservation has been refocused on how much carbon each person is adding to the atmosphere. For a glassblowing studio, the amount can be considerable.
Figuring your carbon footprint is a simple equation. Multiply the therms listed on your gas bill by 12.0593. That is the number of pounds of carbon dioxide that is emitted as a result of burning one therm of natural gas. Then divide this sum by 2,205 to convert it into metric tons. A single metric ton of CO2 is what a car emits in about two months of driving, says Lisa A. Moore, a scientist with Environmental Defense. While equivalents vary, there is no question that glass studios contribute significant amounts of carbon to the atmosphere, a single large studio easily releasing the same amount of carbon as over 100 households. With two 1,000-pound day tanks, and seven glory holes, a public-access glass studio could easily produce 480 metric tons of carbon per year, or the equivalent annual output of approximately 70 cars, and that does not include the carbon generated by the use of electric annealers and other equipment.
What are the implications of these numbers? How does a glassblower respond?
Whether driven by an ethical imperative, or economic survival in the face of rising energy costs, glassblowers have never had as much incentive to reexamine the way they approach their art as they do today. And across the world of glass, that reexamination is starting to happen.
Cutting Carbon
New York-based artist Jamie Harris has dropped his lower-priced production line and uses his studio time to make one-of-a-kind work only. Fabricator and sculptor John Lewis, based in Oakland, California, installed a state-of-the-art recuperator on the industrial-sized furnace he uses for casting, and slashed his fuel bill (and carbon output) by a third. Andi Kovell and Justin Parker of Esque Studio in Portland, Oregon, have found that their environmentally sensitive approach to glassmaking--using recycled glass, electric furnaces running on wind energy provided by the local utility, and biodegradable packaging--have translated into greater sales for the retailers who buy their production lines. "In the past, the only eco-friendly products available had a decidedly hippie aesthetic to them," says Kovell. "Today, people in every income bracket can feel comfort in the products available to them as honoring their own commitments to our environment."
Whether it’s a complete reconsideration of one’s approach to glass, or simply taking small steps now that may lead to bigger ones later, the key is to take action to reduce the environmental impact of glass as a medium for contemporary art. "I would hate to see a world where there wasn't glassblowing," says Bill Chameides, chief scientist for Environmental Defense, an advocacy group that has been supporting innovative and practical solutions to environmental issues since 1967. "Having said that, in all professions, it’s possible to carefully look at what you’re doing and look for ways to decrease your carbon footprint.... The most important thing is to not throw your hands up and say you can't do it."
From hiring an outside firm, to analyzing the ways in which your studio might save money and cut its use of fuel, to engaging in a dialogue with other glassblowers about their best practices, every glassblower should be considering how to lower their energy usage and, by extension, their carbon footprint. Because melting larger amounts of glass in one tank requires less energy than many smaller tanks, Eddie Bernard of Wet Dog Glass urges private studio owners to consider teaming up with other area glassblowers to share a facility, or to consider working at public-access facilities to cut costs and lower their impact on the environment.
Larger facilities also have access to higher levels of quality in engineering and design. Despite all the advances, the small market for glassblower studio equipment has meant that small-studio equipment still means hand-built, one-off furnaces that are only as good as the person building them and later operating them. Contrast that with industry, where teams of engineers study ways to optimize efficiency, and highly trained facility managers operate furnaces at peak performance. For years, industrial glass facilities have been using a high percentage of recycled glass, large electric furnaces instead of gas-fired furnaces, and heat recuperators, all of which are considered cutting-edge in the Studio Glass world.
Regulation Likely to Raise Prices
Further incentives to cut energy usage might be coming in the form of government programs to limit the levels of carbon produced in the United States. Instead of a carbon tax, Chameides thinks a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, similar to what has been done to limit acid rain by controlling sulphur emissions, could come into effect in the next few years. This would work by setting limits on the power utilities and refineries to regulate how much carbon they could release in a given year. Those who managed to stay under their quota, or "cap," would be allowed to sell or "trade" their unused allowances to producers unable to meet their carbon limits. This is a highly efficient, market-based system has been shown to be highly effective in the case of controlling acid rain. But one thing is almost certain: prices may be affected. "There will be some increase," says Chameides. "It will not be entirely painless to transition to the low-carbon economy."
But the expense of producing glass has always been, throughout history, a part of the equation. Glass producers, whether they were factories or artists’ studios, have had to find ways to survive when energy became more expensive, or the industry had to adapt to a new fuel or technology. "Glass making is a very expensive undertaking due to the high cost of fuel and raw materials, and always has been," says Jutta-Annette Page, curator of glass at the Toledo Museum of Glass. "This is because energy is a particularly costly resource, no matter what kind of fuel you are talking about." Central European glass production during the medieval and early renaissance periods took place in temporary glassblowing facilities that would be moved when huge swaths of forest had been cut and burned to feed the fires. When the King of England needed wood to build naval vessels in the 17th century and set bans on the use of wood fuel to make glass, many glassworks closed down, according to Page. Those continuing on began using coal, and the new technology associated with it ushered in a new era of glassblowing. Throughout history, the ebb and flow of fuel costs and availability have driven change and innovation.
As the Studio Glass movement begins to take a closer look at how to adapt to changing landscape of energy, there is solace in the historical evidence that the allure of glass has always been strong enough to spur new discoveries so that glass production can survive and thrive for a new generation.
ANDREW PAGE is the editor in chief of GLASS: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly.
NOTE: The print version of this article includes profiles of four innovative artists pursuing energy efficiency in their glass studios. To read about Simon Pearce's electric waterfall, Lori Beck's landfill dream, Christian Thornton's recycling plant, and Hugh Jenkins's deep fryer, order the FALL 2007 edition (GLASS #108) by emailing info@glassquarterly.com or dialing toll-free: 800.607.4410.