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Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, Buffalo, NY
Architect: Merdad Yazdani & Canon Design
Located in Buffalo, NY, the HWI is an independent not-for-profit biomedical research facility. Its motto The Cure Begins Here, guides its research by creating strategies and technologies to promote the understanding, prevention, and treatment of many disease.
The HWI wished to use the glass of the building’s facade to communicate its work to the public, and to reinforce the significance of its staff with visual and symbolic emphases. Scientists working at the HWI introduced me to their research and methods. Consulting with these researchers in person initiated the development of the window’s design, one that represents the Institute’s transfigurative accomplishments. The abstract composition is sandblasted on all four layers of insulated glass. The design components use packing structures as shapes, mathematical formulae as lines and diffraction patterns and protein structures as circles. These shapes overlap and interact in the eye of the viewer in an aesthetically pleasing and meaningful ways.
The facility’s sandblasted glass facade illustrates artifacts of the actual research being conducted within the building, including x-ray crystallographic diffraction patterns; a mathematical formula created by Herbert Hauptman known as the minimal function; the insulin protein structure; and elements of cell formation known as packing structures. The elements of the composition form a cohesive statement, one that highlights the community’s identity as an organization devoted to seeking a cure for diabetes.
The HWI wished to use the glass of the building’s facade to communicate its work to the public, and to reinforce the significance of its staff with visual and symbolic emphases. Scientists working at the HWI introduced me to their research and methods. Consulting with these researchers in person initiated the development of the window’s design, one that represents the Institute’s transfigurative accomplishments. The abstract composition is sandblasted on all four layers of insulated glass. The design components use packing structures as shapes, mathematical formulae as lines and diffraction patterns and protein structures as circles. These shapes overlap and interact in the eye of the viewer in an aesthetically pleasing and meaningful ways.
The facility’s sandblasted glass facade illustrates artifacts of the actual research being conducted within the building, including x-ray crystallographic diffraction patterns; a mathematical formula created by Herbert Hauptman known as the minimal function; the insulin protein structure; and elements of cell formation known as packing structures. The elements of the composition form a cohesive statement, one that highlights the community’s identity as an organization devoted to seeking a cure for diabetes.
Powers of Ten: Ho Science Center, Colgate University
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Colgate University’s Science Department commissioned the creation of an art glass design for its main staircase that would make use of the conceptual framework of the Powers of Ten, and by so doing, to emphasize and illustrate the breadth and diversity of its science curriculum. I worked with a committee of faculty from diverse areas of scientific study in order best to choose images that would vividly define each of the University’s fields of scientific study. The images are organized by beginning at the bottom of the stairwell with the lowest powers, such as sub-particulate matter, and then ascending step by step (quite literally) to the highest floor of the building, where the images of the greatest powers, such as colliding galaxies, are sandblasted onto the balustrades. Its sandblasted imagery not only distinguishes each discipline practiced in the Center, it also, as it proceeds along the glass balustrades of the central staircase from its basement to the planetarium on its highest floor, provides a metaphor for ascension in space, time, and knowledge.
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Architect: Shepley Bullfinch
Jumping Into The World: Hamilton Public Library
The Hamilton Public Library commissioned an art glass design for the front entrance to its building. Because light was limited, sandblasted clear glass was specified. The art glass divides the vestibule from the library’s interior, and is back-lit by the entrance. The design, one that is sandblasted on both sides of its glass, attempts to capture–especially for young readers who are entering the library–how joyfully falling into the limitless world of knowledge may indeed feel.
The images represent figures jumping into a swirling constellation of handprints, each composed of tiny dots, or stars, that represent the galaxy of our shared universe, and our shared humanity. The handprints allude to petroglyphs that have been found in prehistoric sites. The handprints represent anonymous individuals working cooperatively, and provide a metaphor for community. Spinning around the panel’s galaxy are spheres that represent distinct fields of study that can be explored within any library.
The images represent figures jumping into a swirling constellation of handprints, each composed of tiny dots, or stars, that represent the galaxy of our shared universe, and our shared humanity. The handprints allude to petroglyphs that have been found in prehistoric sites. The handprints represent anonymous individuals working cooperatively, and provide a metaphor for community. Spinning around the panel’s galaxy are spheres that represent distinct fields of study that can be explored within any library.
Keck Center Colgate University
The objective of this design was to divide a single space into one that could accommodate at least two activities at once, and to do so with a single light source, and this was accomplished by creating glass dividing walls. The glass walls successfully maximize available light by screening, but not obscuring, vision, and by inviting its sandblasted imagery to allude to the study of the Humanities that takes place within its confines.
The Keck Center is a language laboratory and a meeting place for the Humanities. The glass walls dividing the lab from the center are insulated and sandblasted with images of classical Greek sculpture that have been extracted from their contexts and reconfigured into separate tableaux, each one representing a discipline taught in humanistic study.
The Keck Center is a language laboratory and a meeting place for the Humanities. The glass walls dividing the lab from the center are insulated and sandblasted with images of classical Greek sculpture that have been extracted from their contexts and reconfigured into separate tableaux, each one representing a discipline taught in humanistic study.
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Architect: Tai Soo Kim Partners
Nature Nurture: Hamilton Central School
Hamilton Central School wished to enliven the entry ways for both its elementary and high school wings. Visibility and light were of utmost importance, so sandblasting the insulated glass of the entries provided an ideal solution. The project’s themes of growth and nurture led to the choice of the Fibonacci number sequence as the key for understanding the imagery for the high school. Although many of the natural elements in the elementary entrance also have allusions to Fibonacci, its art predominantly addresses the concept of nurture in nature, and thus, hidden in the high grass can be found the distinct developmental stages of a monarch butterfly. Additional imagery alluding to the Fibonacci number sequence as observed in the natural world include the logarithmic spiral of a weather pattern (a hurricane), the bones of a human hand, and the packing sequence of podded sunflower seeds. All of the imagery visualizes the relationship of a mathematical sequence to the natural world, while it simultaneously highlights the intimate correspondence between them.
Dempsey Health Center: U CONN Farmington, Ct
The Connecticut Percent for the Arts program sponsored a competition to create art glass for the interior space of a large cafeteria in the hospital. The hospital wanted to have the potential to divide the space for daily use, but also occasionally to open it broadly for special events. I won this competition by proposing to create wood and glass screens that would slide on ceiling tracks, and that may be locked in place when open, or folded and moved aside.
Architect: Tai Soo Kim Partners
Architect: Flynn Battaglia
Quick Fine Arts Center, St Bonaventure University, St Bonaventure, NY
The architects defined two projects that I then helped to develop and design. The Quick Fine Arts Center’s exterior glazed terra cotta panels represent the fine arts that are practiced within the building; they also allude to other decorative terra cotta ornamentation that enhances many other buildings on campus. The interior hanging glass sculpture suspended in the atrium of the Fine Arts Center is composed of numerous clear and dichroic glass panels sandblasted with the donors’ names in order to commemorate their part in the creation of the center. The glass cascades in the brightly lit space, thus reflecting and transmitting color on the atrium walls. Six glazed terra cotta relief panels, each representing the arts of dance, theater, music, painting, sculpture, and film, adorn the facade.
Business School: U CONN Storrs, Storrs Ct
The Connecticut Percent for Art program commissioned me to create art glass for the Business School at UCONN Storrs. The objective was to design a program of glass that would resonate throughout the building, and at the same time, by unifying color and design, to invite these asymmetrically shaped windows to welcome the glass they configure. Stained, leaded, and sandblasted glass panels are incorporated into the windows of the Business School, and extend from its atrium to its board room, offices, entry ways, and study areas. The central sandblasted theme illustrates abstracted furrows of plowed fields in reference to the University’s origin as a land-grant agricultural foundation as well as it does to its present objective, and that is to till the soil of intellectual growth.
Architect: Mark Simon & Centerbrook Architects
Architect: Louis Sullivan
Prudential/ Guaranty Building: Buffalo, NY
The Guaranty Building fell into decline over the years, and most of its beautiful exterior and interior details were obscured by renovations, including the placement of a cast iron and a stained glass skylight over the lobby. The entire building was saved at the last minute from the wrecking ball and completely renovated. I was commissioned to restore the stained glass ceiling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudential_(Guaranty)_Building
http://www.hodgsonruss.com/Louis-Sullivans-Guaranty-Building.html
Painted Windows: Yale, Cornell, NY State Bar Association
These images depict various traditional painted stained glass comissions. Represented are examples of figurative stained glass which employ the use of enamels painted on glass and fired to fuse them to the substrate.The fired pieces are joined together with lead came and installed in the designated architecture.
9/11 Memorial, Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, Cazenovia, New York
The 9/11 Memorial is a glass sculpture comprised of eight panels that are sandblasted, painted, and configured to resemble the four corners of the World Trade Towers. The sculpture allows the viewer to pass through its center. By moving in and around it, its overlapping imagery constantly evolves.
https://sqhap.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Quarry_Hill_Art_Park