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CCA Lecture November 8

As part of the architecture and interior design series, Nikolas will be giving a lecture at the California College of the Arts on Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 7 pm. He will discuss the work, the shop, and his band of mad cohorts. Here is the blurb overview:

Nikolas Weinstein Studios is a place where art, architecture, technology, design, and engineering come together to create large-scale, site-specific glass installations. With an aesthetic drawn from the natural world, Nikolas's work appears animated and unrestrained but at the same time each piece must be a strictly controlled and carefully engineered system.

These opposing imperatives, and the artistic and technical challenges they pose, have drawn a rich and idiosyncratic mix of artists, engineers, craftspeople, gadgeteers, and other creative problem solvers to the studio team. In a very real sense, the studio is defined by the team's willingness—nay, eagerness—to take on new and unusual challenges.

Solutions to these challenges include: building a room-size kiln from scratch for a one-off project; shipping containers packed with flat-folded glass "fabric" that can be unfurled and shaped on site like origami; harnessing gravity to lend a gentle curve to a piece of glass the size of a tree trunk; or sometimes a magnet on a stick is all that's needed.

Nikolas will be sharing videos, images, and stories from a number of recent projects, illuminating the problems they posed, and the processes and solutions that made them possible.