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Lamberts Mouth-Blown Glass Installation for USC Alumni Center

I’m happy to share another recently completed project – a Lamberts mouth-blown glass installation for the University of South Carolina (USC)’s Alumni Center, the first permanent Alumni Center in the school’s 200 year history.

I took a slightly different approach with its design compared to other recent works. As I’ve done many times before, I worked with LambertsGlas out of Germany and S.A. Bendheim here in the US.; but rather than employing additional processes such as painting or etching, I worked with sheets of glass straight from the factory. The full sheets, which are approximately 24″ x 36″, were cut up into smaller pieces roughly 4″ x 11″. These became the fundamental elements of the design. Bendheim is the exclusive North American importer of Lamberts glass.

To be fair, of course, I wasn’t working with just any glass from the factory. Lamberts created a special customized version of their mouth-blown Original Lamberts-Streaky-Glass for this work. I was interested in the Streaky-Glass in part because it reminds me of feathers, loosely referencing USC’s mascot of “Cocky” the gamecock (fighting rooster). All Lamberts-Streaky-Glass is made through an age-old process that involves blowing out huge cylinders, then manually scoring the cylinders lengthwise, reheating, and opening them up to lay flat. Every sheet of glass comes out differently, with its own unique character; but for my purposes, Lamberts customized the glass even further – silvering the back of the sheets for reflection, making sure the streaks moved in the right direction, and working to get the precise opalescent quality that I wanted. The color was selected, of course, to coordinate with USC’s official colors of garnet and black.

As with most of my work, I had designed the piece ahead of time, using Photoshop to render a map of how the pieces of glass would be laid out. But the work also references the free play of Surrealist cut-up techniques, with a considerable amount of intuitive decision-making involved. The final work features a gradation from dark to light, similar to works like my art glass installation for CalSTRS; but rather than achieving this gradation with paint, it happened with the glass itself.

The finished piece is prominently situated near the Alumni Center’s lobby level elevator – and the 65,000-square-foot building is now open, already serving as the new “pulse, the heartbeat and the epicenter for Carolina alumni worldwide,” as USC President Harris Pastides predicted in an early press release. Check it out, if you find yourself in Columbia!