Viewing: Architecture

courtesy: glass light hotel.

Wednesday February 19, 2020 | by Farah Rose Smith

The Glass Light Hotel, a longtime dream of Norfolk arts patrons Doug and Pat Perry, opens for business while gallery construction continues

FILED UNDER: Architecture, Design, News, Opening

Like their fellow Chrysler Museum of Art art patrons Richard and Carolyn Barry, who built a university art museum to exhibit their extensive collection, Doug and Pat Perry decided to construct a building where they could showcase their considerable holdings of glass art. But unlike the Barry Art Museum at Old Dominion University, the Perry collection is now on view at The Glass Light Hotel, where the majority of the viewers are staying the night at this boutique inn in the heart of downtown Norfolk, Virginia. A hotel that can also be a home for art was inspired by the Perry's trip to a Glass Art Society conference in Louisville, Kentucky, where they were transfixed by the first 21c museum/hotel, where contemporary art projects are integrated throughout. "We came back and said, 'Wouldn't it be neat to have a boutique, artsy, glass-art-themed hotel in downtown Norfolk?' " Doug Perry told the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in a 2016 interview about the project.

Inna Babaeva, Men O’war, 2017, glass, H 36. W 36, D 36 in. courtesy: sarah thaw

Friday July 28, 2017 | by Sarah Thaw

SEEN: A real estate company turns unlikely spaces into showcases for contemporary art

FILED UNDER: Architecture, Exhibition, On the street, Public Art, Seen

Contemporary art is on display in unexpected spaces within New York City and beyond thanks to the Art-in-Buildings program, an initiative by real-estate company Time Equities, Inc. that is transforming windows into non-traditional exhibition spaces. The program was founded in 2001 by Time Equities, Inc. CEO Francis Greenburger, who, after walking into an empty lobby in one of his downtown Manhattan properties, decided that the space would be a perfect place to display art. Since that initial idea, the concept has grown to include building fronts in many different sites -- from the Financial District and other areas in New York City, to buildings across the United States and in three different countries -- and over 110 artists have been featured in its rotating exhibitions.Currently on view at the program's West 10th Window, a street-level storefront window located in Manhattan’s West Village that has featured unique artists in short-term exhibitions since 2012 is an installation by Ukraine-born, New York-based artist Inna Babaeva, who frequently employs glass in her work (Disclosure: The work was fabricated at the studios of UrbanGlass, the nonprofit arts center that published the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet as well as the print publication GLASS.). Eliana Blechman, the curatorial assistant and exhibitions coordinator of Time Equities’ Art-in-Buildings program, said that said she and her fellow curators “scour the internet, galleries and magazines” for unique artists to invite to display their work in the space.

Plan of "One Map of Many Moments" in Fort Greene Park. courtesy: Amanda Patenaud

Wednesday July 19, 2017 | by Sarah Thaw

Broken glass knits a community as artist Amanda Patenaude facilitates a public mosaic project

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Architecture, Artist Interviews, News, Opening, Public Art

Brooklyn-based artist Amanda Patenaude has proved that one person’s trash can literally become another person's treasure, as she facilitated a community project to recast dangerous shards of broken glass into works of art. It all began in 2014, when a public park association known as the Fort Greene Park Conservancy (FGPC) turned to nearby arts nonprofit UrbanGlass in search of an artist to make use out of all the broken glass swept up in their efforts to beautify this urban green space. Patenaude, who describes her practice as “a nice blend of working with garbage and the things we throw away, as they relate back to our habits and the environments we inhabit,” was a perfect fit.The Brooklyn-based artist presented the FGPC with a list of what could be accomplished with the waste glass and from there, the work began. After six months of clean-up, the discarded glass that was accumulated was re-melted and blown into an ornament that was presented at a 2015 tree-lighting ceremony organized by FGPC and the community organization known as the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project.

rendering of the Chihuly Sanctuary. courtesy: Buffet Cancer Center website.

Friday May 19, 2017 | by Gabi Gimson

OPENING: Chihuly Sanctuary lends comfort to patients at Buffett Cancer Center

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Architecture, New Work, News, Public Art

This afternoon, the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center in Omaha, Nebraska, will unveil The Chihuly Sanctuary—an extensive installation, featuring more than 200 original works by lauded glass maestro, Dale Chihuly. The sanctuary is a keystone of the Healing Arts Program at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and its clinical partner, Nebraska Medicine. and was made possible by a lead gift from Omaha philanthropists, Walter Scott and his late wife, Suzanne. The Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center began construction in 2010 thanks to a major donation by Pamela Buffet and her late husband Fred, a relative of billionaire and Omaha native, Warren Buffet. Fred Buffett died of complications from kidney cancer in 1997. The 615,000-square-foot building cost $323 million to construct and is set to open its doors to patients in June.

Dan Clayman, Mapping 16,000 Parts, 2017. Burned paper. collection: the artist

Tuesday May 9, 2017 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Dan Clayman takes his glass panel assemblages to new heights in sculpture park exhibit

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Architecture, Artist Interviews, New Work, News, Opening, Public Art

With a rainy VIP opening on Friday, May 5th, and the sun breaking through for a Saturday "Meet the Artist" afternoon event on May 6th, Dan Clayman unveiled Radiant Landscape, a monumental new project installed at the Grounds for Sculpture's Museum Building in Hamilton, New Jersey. This large-scale work that rises two stories is made up of thousands of 22-by-32-inch glass sheets rigged together in an intricate but elegant engineering solution which presents three fields of glass suspended vertically, at a steep pitch, and horizontally. The individual components are in shades of sunset gold, clear, and oceanic blue glass. The gold and clear are adjacent to one another and interact as they diffuse light that filters into the building's large windows, altering its hue and connecting to the landscape outside, and revealing several of Clayman's mapped-boulder sculptures (named for the geolocation where the natural boulder was found). The blue color field is suspended horizontally, and, bathed in its aquatic hues, one cannot escape the feeling of being under the surface of a large body of water.

Thursday April 20, 2017 | by Gabi Gimson

Nikolas Weinstein’s Jakarta project pushes scale, and his design and installation team, to the limit

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Architecture, New Work, Public Art

UPDATED 04/27/2017

Apple claims its exterior glass cladding represents the "world's largest curved glass panels." courtesy: apple

Thursday February 23, 2017 | by Andrew Page

ARCHITECTURE: Glass plays lead role in new state-of-the-art Apple headquarters by Foster + Partners

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Architecture, Design, Video

Apple employees will be moving their desks to the much-anticipated new headquarters, Apple Park, sometime in April, according to a company press release, even though the construction process on the Santa Clara Valley, California, facility won't be complete until fall 2017. Billed as one of the world's most energy-efficient buildings thanks to its massive rooftop solar array and a natural ventilation system that is projected to need no heat or air conditioning 9 months of the year, the massive ring-shaped central building designed by Foster + Partners also claims to have the world's largest curved glass panels, which clad the space-ship like structure in seamless sheets of silica. Over 12,000 people will eventually occupy the new complex when it's fully occupied. The main building alone will provide 2.8 million square feet of space.

Martin Blank pictured with one of the two glass artworks that animate a city park in lower Manhattan.

Friday January 27, 2017 | by Andrew Page

CONVERSATION: Martin Blank on the installation of his NYC public-art project

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Architecture, New Work, News, Public Art

Martin Blank has called the concept of "flow" the unifying theme of the last 25 years of his career as an artist, and this is readily apparent in his latest public art commission. Set to be unveiled in Spring 2017 in the small city park next to the recently opened Four Seasons Hotel New York Downtown, Blank has created two working fountains in which the multiple glass elements mediate the falling water, and reference it in its cascading forms that appear like splashing water, or eddies. Contrasting with the restrained "New Classical" style of the building's architect, Robert A. M. Stern, Blank's exuberant work animates and enlivens the exterior space with its celebration of gravity and the shared fluidity of water and glass. The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet spoke to Blank after installation was complete, but before the water would be turned back on, about the project that he calls "the hardest installation he's done in his career."

The Bousilles, or Whimseys in English, were a collection of factory worker experiments made in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Tuesday November 29, 2016 | by Andrew Page

MusVerre, a new glass museum in Northern France

FILED UNDER: Architecture, Museums, News, Opening

While the conversion of a former glass factory into a museum is not in itself unusual, the recently expanded MusVerre celebrates a peculiarly touching history. Beginning as a 1967 exhibition of curiosity pieces made by factory glassblowers in the 19th and early-20th centuries, the project of MusVerre reached new heights with its grand reopening in a new building designed by Raphaël Voinchet and W-Architectures earlier this month in Sars-Poteries, France. The inauguration is being celebrated with an exhibition by Ann Veronica Janssens, a Belgian artist whose “relevance, power and poetry... recurrent use of glass as a material and the very particular fit of the “wide-angle” space [of the new museum] to her work made this invitation an obvious choice,” for the museum’s curators.

Skyslide

Thursday July 7, 2016 | by Sarah Canny

CURIOSITIES: Slide 1,000 feet above Los Angeles latest architectural glass gimmick

FILED UNDER: Architecture, Curiosities, News

Following a top-floor renovation, The U.S. Bank Tower in downtown Los Angeles has just opened a unique and tourist-friendly architectural feature called "The Skyslide," an unusual way to access the expansive new observation deck on the building's 69th floor (which can also be reached by elevator). More dramatic (and somewhat silly) is to slide down from the 70th floor, enjoying the sights via a glass chute 1,018-feet above ground. The transparency of glass heightens the views from highest public vantage point in Los Angles, and the tallest building west of the Mississippi. While a ride on an empty sack down to the outdoor observation deck is not the most elegant way to get there, the glass slide is a headline-seeking way to get publicity, at which it has been quite successful. The official website of the OUE Skyspace deck and Skyslide can be found here.

Glass: The UrbanGlass Quarterly, a glossy art magazine published four times a year by UrbanGlass has provided a critical context to the most important artwork being done in the medium of glass for more than 40 years.