Clear Choices

Eric Herman

Among all of the many projects we’ve published in WaterShapes, a few have stood out as being extraordinary because of the artful ways they combine glass with water. In capable hands, the properties of solid and liquid combine to make statements about both materials that are constantly intriguing and frequently mesmerizing.

In this issue, you’ll find a fresh example of this combination in “Sailing Grace,” an article by Michael Batchelor and Andrey Berezowsky of Montreal’s SWON Design (click here). They were called on to provide a sculpture for the corporate headquarters of a giant technology company and came up with a cluster of dramatic sails made of slumped and textured glass set amid a highly reflective architectural pond – a stunning composition that plays with the transparency and visual fluidity of both materials.

I single out this feature because of the way it resonates with one we published in October 2008 – “Winds of Life” by John Gilbert Luebtow. That project also features a string of slumped-glass panels, this one positioned on a large corporate plaza in Los Angeles. In comparing the two works, and indeed in examining the assembled works of these artists, you’ll see differences in approach, style and tone – but also some substantial similarities in aesthetic sensibilities, design strategies and scale.

In working with Batchelor and Berezowsky as well as with Luebtow (all of whom have contributed articles to WaterShapes in the past), I asked each of them if they were familiar with the other’s work, given that they make exquisite use of glass and water and seem at least superficially to be doing it in somewhat similar ways. All reported not having seen the other’s work.

What I find fascinating in their synchronicity – that is, in their separate development of similar design solutions – is that these fine artists most likely arrived on common ground because of their choice of glass and water as media. It really surfaces when you hear them use the same terms to describe their work and how they revel in the way glass distorts views, transmits light, works in concert with the reflective qualities of water and can be used to engage nearby architecture.

It must be noted that these artists are fiercely independent and committed to blazing new creative trails, yet it’s clear that the physical nature and constraints of the materials they’ve chosen have led them to tap into similar (yet distinctive) sets of creative impulses.

Casting out a bit to make a broader point, it seems to me that many of the materials most frequently wielded by watershapers – glass, stone, plants, concrete, metal, wood and tile – lead designers and builders who harness their aesthetic potentials to work along all sorts of similar lines. The key to individuality (that is, the genius of distinguishing your work from anyone else’s) has to do with your success in evaluating those materials in light of a specific site and a specific client and using them to provoke specific human emotions and past associations in ways that produce delight and inspiration.

Batchelor and Berezowsky succeed magnificently on that score, as does Luebtow.