THEME: “Mixed Media”

Boda glassworks has been the Swedish glasshouse where the designers went wild and had all the freedom to experiment as they wished in the 1950s, 60´s and 70´, which made the glasshouse flourish more than any other glasshouse in the Swedish Kingdom of Crystal.

In Boda a tradition of experimenting with mixed media has long been existing. When the artist and designer Erik Höglund came to the Boda Glasworks in 1953 he paved the way for a young, new generation of designers who started questioning the traditional norm of how glass should look and how it should be designed.

In Boda the glass designers worked with wood and metal, combining different materials for a young new clientele by taking into account that the Swedish society had changed dramatically.

Today the Swedish Kingdom of Crystal is rapidly changing and new ideas for production are necessary to be an input for the new development of glass.

THEME: “Liquid Fusion”

Organized in collaboration with the GlassLab™ of The Corning Museum of Glass

Architect, designer and tutor Paul Haigh and the GlassLab™ return to Boisbuchet for a glass design exploration workshop focusing on the ephemeral and sublime qualities of glass as a rich palette for innovation and intervention. Emphasis will be placed on the idea of “…glass as a liquid” in exploring a material that can transform process into poetry.

Working with expert glassmakers from the Corning Museum of Glass, the participants will explore and develop individual ideas to fabricate glass concept at multiple scales from fashion to furniture, from artifact to architecture. Each new design will be fabricated through multiple prototypes utilizing the process offered, including pipe blowing, fusing, hand pressing and glass sheet forming. The participants will examine glass making as an art form that offers a multitude of methods appropriate for today’s design tasks.

DESIGN BRIEF

THEME: ‘INSIDE OUTSIDE’

The Saint-Just Glassworks has an expertise that is unique in the world. A French “Living Heritage Company” (EPV), located in Saint-Just-Saint-Rambert since 1826, the Saint-Just Glassworks was originally a stained glass manufacturing plant. Since 1865 it has specialized in the production of hand-blown glass for making architectural flat glass. It has used the same technique since the 19th century.

In particular, the company produces colored glass for most of the stained glass window shops working in heritage restoration. It also supplies clear double-paned windows for historical monuments, thus allying traditional techniques with modern performance. By producing artisanal flat glass from hand-blown glass, the three-dimensional object is transformed into a two-dimensional material ideal for architectural applications. During the workshop, the usual process of transforming the material into an object is reversed: the object becomes the material. The glass thus becomes a material that takes shapes as an object to create a micro-architecture that can be placed inside or outside, at home or in the urban space. With the glass blown and drawn at Saint-Just Glassworks, all possibilities are open to the creativity of the designers and architects.

The designers will work in pairs with the students.

DESIGN BRIEF

THEME: ‘SILENT LUXURY, GLASS DESIGN FOR EVERYONE’

Is the luxury market the only way to safeguard the arts applied in design-led crafts?

In contrast to mass production, which results in low-cost items for a global market, must the design-led crafts automatically adopt an inverse position and create only objects sold at unreasonably high prices? On the contrary, at CIAV Meisenthal we believe that the challenge must be to create design for everyone, invoking the magic of place and secular know-how. While there are no constraints for designing expensive objects – for galleries and collectors -, it is much harder to imagine high quality glass objects sold at prices that are accessible to a larger audience. This will be the theme of the Meisenthal workshop : to imagine in situ, within the heart of a factory being reborn, objects that are ingenious, attractive and innovative, by optimising or revisiting the processes and tools of traditional production that have been made available. Simply “design”, but without excluding the history of the site, and the beauty of the movements and rituals of the glassmaker. And including as well the vision and creativity of the designers, combined with the knowledge and artisanal crafts techniques that fall within the experimentation process of CIAV Meisenthal.