Glass Artists Create a “River of Glass” for Historic Pittsburgh Building

A river of glass now flows through Pittsburgh in the city’s first all glass public art installation. “Rivers of Glass: Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” located in the lobby of 11 Stanwix Street, an historic 1960s-era high-modernist office tower in downtown Pittsburgh owned by RexxHall Realty LLC, opened to the public on Monday, January 11.

The installation was designed and fabricated by Jill Reynolds and Daniel Spitzer, a team of glass artists from Beacon, N.Y. Artists from across the United States submitted ideas for the $75,000 lighting commission and out of 28 applications, a panel of jurors selected Reynolds and Spitzer’s design early in 2009 based on the concept, quality and meaningful narrative.

The installation uses approximately 1,300 blown glass forms to illustrate Pittsburgh’s three rivers in three ways:

•The overhead installation depicting Pittsburgh’s three rivers – the Allegheny, the Monongahela and the Ohio – covers an estimated 1,500 square feet and is oriented in the direction of and parallel to the actual riverfront. The suspended glass globes hang from steel cables two feet from the ceiling.

•It includes approximately 1,300 individually hand blown glass forms modeled on high-speed images of water droplets. Working in collaboration with Bo Gehring, a 3-D computer modeler, an alphabet of 26 varying 3-D water droplet forms in eight shades and intensities of blue were designed. The forms were blown at Pittsburgh Glass Center and then suspended from the ceiling at 11 Stanwix in groups of threes and fours.

•The suspended glass forms are hung to create an undulating wave that represents a segment of a sound wave from the song “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” by Pittsburgh jazz legend Billy Strayhorn. A segment of the sound wave was stretched on a computer with Gehring’s assistance to fit within the lobby space and filled with the vocabulary of glass elements that were designed. The forms create a four-foot thick undulating wave formation, rising and falling within a range of seven feet from the top of the wave to the bottom of the wave trough.

When it planned to update the building, RexxHall Realty LLC partnered with architecture firm EDGE Studio and Pittsburgh Glass Center to launch this project in fall

2008.

“The modern architecture of the building and the open expansive lobby seemed to demand that it contain beautiful art pieces,” says Aaron Stauber, president of RexxHall Realty. “We believe it was the intent of the architects to create an area that would showcase publicly accessible art. At the same time, we hoped it would enhance the work experience for our tenants. We were fortunate to have the Pittsburgh Glass

Center to assist us in bringing our vision into a reality.”