Handle With Care (in progress, 2018)
In Chicago's second Architecture Biennial (2017) the Hyde Park Art Center together with Amanda Williams accepted Resident Architects to respond to the topic Materials Decoded. As one of the selected few I decided to approach soda lime sheet glass. Over the past few decades it has become ever more common in our day to day environment, ever more of a design crutch for architects. We live in an age where all glass buildings face other all glass buildings and the craft of these buildings has long since moved on to factories away from craftsmen.
Through this project I decided to get the craftsman's intimacy with the material through controlled fracturing. Beginning with a glass cutter, I learned to cut lines, to size sheets. From there I moved toward impacts, with both blunt and sharp objects. When combined it became very evident that scoring lines creates isolated regions, where in impacts and further interactions occur independent of one another. Most recently I have been using combinations of a glass cutter and a torch to create fractures which defy simple interpretation.
The eventual aim is to come upon an understanding of composition, between controlled and uncontrolled fractures, things which seem at once easy and difficult to understand. In a sense it feels like I am sculpting in the thickness of the glass, my third dimension is only an 1/8th of an inch. Currently there are 37 iterations of an expected 50 experiments all of which are 8x10 inch panes of glass.