An Open Letter to Dale Chihuly

I want to collaborate. I have this vision perhaps only you can realize. If you permit me a few moments, I’d like to tell you about an idea.

It has been a pleasure to find your work years ago. Maybe it was first in Jay Rydman’s office where you had paid Jay to produce a documentary on your work in half a dozens pieces. Maybe it was Jay’s production I saw first, I don’t recall. But since then I’ve watched TV and visited museums to see this explosion of light and form you have guided into being. We almost met in Dallas at the installation of your work at the Dallas Museum of Art but it wasn’t to be. A few years ago, I almost bought a piece of yours from Pismo Galleries in Denver but I couldn’t satisfy my enthusiasm for your work with a small piece that doesn’t capture my imagination.

There are times when I see your work, when I just feel awash in something that’s like bliss, your artistry connects with me at a very deep level. I have to assume I’m not alone in this, given the global nature of your installations and exhibits. I wish we’d met when you we working with ice and neon, just so I could have had so many years of conversation.

I would like you to consider a new work. A permanent outdoor installation of light and water for Boulder, Colorado.

The fountains of Rome amaze me, they were constructed to run from gravity, feed by aqueducts as an ancient statement of energy efficiency. Boulder Creek is fed a constant stream of clean, clear water from the nearby mountain snows of the Rockies. The creek is a natural aqueduct but there have been no artisans or architects designing and working to build gravity fed fountains demonstrating this local power of nature. In addition to clean, clear mountain water, Boulder has over 300 days of sunshine. And, the light at certain times of the year, the light is magical in the late Fall and winter. Sometimes at sunrise and sunset the air is filled with that “golden” glow, if only for a few minutes a day. A few weeks ago I saw the green reflections in the sky from the sun hitting the mountain trees and for only seconds a beautiful melon pastel streak of cloud folded into a golden yellow and orange sky at sunset. This was so unbelievable, I had to ask a stranger if they were seeing what I was before I could accept I was looking at a melon green sky. This is a place of color; of light. This is a place where your art work might fit hand and glove with the landscape. I would like you to consider coming here to see whether this place can inspire and support a very large and massive glass fountain.

Your Venice project alerted me to the way your work integrates and binds, illuminates and chimes with a natural surrounding. The experience for me is quite different than visiting the DMA or any museum. It occurred to me a few days ago, that your work, your imagination, your industry is unique to be able to terra form something like glass hills to walk through and around. A work that might harness the power of gravity fed fountains lit by sunlight and painted with the color of reflection and refraction. Focused through your lens of artistry. I envision hills of glass rounded and mounded across half an acre…spiking shafts of light and mists of water 40 to 80 feet in the air to atomize into cool blue skies or royal blue and orange evenings. I hope my vision might be just a note that you might hear a symphony and that your impression might shape and transforms my simple daydream of a cloud in the hills into a place we can enjoy for a hundred years.

Boulder is a place of creative and expressive people. Its political and cultural diversity have led to modest, sometimes mediocre civic leadership. Sadly Boulder is a place with so many hearts and minds of creative spirit that it can’t define public art. City government has no skill or taste in the arts and no recent examples of its interest. So it is up to us, the people of this place to be the stewards of public art and inform elected leaders of what we intend to create in our place. Please don’t misunderstand, Boulder as a community understands and embraces public craft work and there are a few works of art that inspire public passion. But what a private/public art project like a Chihuly fountain might provide is a path for higher artistic public expression and perhaps illuminate a bridge between craft and art; past and future.

GlidePATH is a journey of imagination between two places. A Chihuly Fountain would be a wonderful destination, if only in our mind’s eye.

cheers & merry christmas

December 25, 2006

Points along the way

In 1994 in Hannover, Germany the city’s public transit operator Ustra commissioned the work of a group of Europe’s architects to each ply their trade to design a miniature statement of their philosophy. The result was a series of bus stops but more importantly they were public works of art. Every day commuters enjoyed the inspired work of Alessandro Mendini, Andreas Brandolini, Wolfgang Laubersheimer, Ettore Sottsass, Heike Muhlhaus, Oscar Tusquets Blanca, Frank O. Gehry, Jassper Morrison and Massimo Iosa Ghini.

Imagine.

Point A

Denver’s history is rife with the work of the world’s leading architects. After years of living in Colorado, I am just realizing that in addition to Michael Graves, Daniel Libeskind and the only project Gio Ponte built in America; Philip Johnson and IM Pei have also designed and built in Denver. Denver has a world class collection that deserves preservation and progress along with a willing, motivated and partnering city.

Point A is in fact that cluster of genius collected by Denver. Properly defining Point B and mapping an experience between Point A and Point B is what I want to be a part of, lead others to embrace and see break through the ground like a powerful seedling in Spring.

“The architect must also learn from the artisan how to love his trade, how beautiful it is to do something for the sake of doing, doing without minding whether one succeeds or not. One is happy to sing just to be able to sing, and never mind how one sings; what matters is to sing; once in a while one of us will sing well.”

gio ponte

The path and the experience of the path is the song to be sung.

GLIDEPATH…a journey of ideas

For about 10 years, I have been considering the experience of traveling from Denver to Boulder along a route of architectural art. I became fascinated by a project I first discovered online from Hannover. This German city had commissioned a series of architectural miniatures designed by the world most exciting architects. Rather than models or temporary art installations the city challenged architects to build functional structures but structures that were small. In this ingenious way, the leaders of Hannover had provided the architectural community with a way to interpret their voice but in a dialect they most likely had not spoken. Hannover had asked architects to express their art and technology, their sense of humanity and their use of materials to build…bus stops.
I am a car guy, a master of my own machine. At first, the idea of propagating mass transit in Boulder seemed alien but then the realization that architectually crafted bus stops would also be beacons on the road travelled by everyone. This realization illuminated the idea further. Imagine a route from Denver to Boulder along the beautiful corridors of city and country, concrete and open space; leading locals and travelers along their daily journey. What an amazing experience to see over a period of 10 years…a diary of the world’s leading architects.

This is why this collection of thoughts is called Glidepath…a journey of ideas

Of course, just as easily I could have subtitled this “glidepath” as a journey of mathmatics, of inspirations, of artistry, of construction, of spacial dances, or sarcastically as public private foley. But I believe and have for 10 years that this Glidepath can be an open air museum of intellect, artististic expression and municipal stewartship.