Glass city

Author: Grace Duggan

Middlebury students looking for a vacation from Vermont's lack of tall buildings and high population density typically use the occasional weekend or a longer break to book it to nearby urban centers like Montreal, Boston and New York. Now students have to walk only as far as the Johnson Memorial Building to get their urban fix, courtesy of Professor of Studio Art Jim Butler's innovative Winter Term course, "City of Your Dreams."

Visitors to the Pit Space find themselves in the middle of a miniature metropolis simultaneously futuristic, timeless and nostalgic, constructed entirely of glass. Abstract shapes and ethereal hanging forms push the city into the realm of the imaginary while many components remain firmly rooted in longstanding approaches to urban planning. The latter includes a grid layout that can be traced as far back as the ancient Greeks, a close proximity to water in keeping with numerous urban centers built along coasts and glass skyscrapers that, with the help of steel, grew to make the International style a dominant aesthetic in many real-life twentieth-century cities. Many of the skyscrapers echo iconic Art Deco forms, particularly the Empire State Building. The tallest structures tend to taper in a step-like fashion strongly reminiscent of New York City's infamous setback laws first introduced in 1916.

The dominant feature of the small-scale city is a winding river slicing the city in a manner reminiscent of Florence's Arno River or the Seine in Paris. Made out of smashed Ford windshields, the river functions primarily as a pathway for visitors and facilitates a crucial tactile connection to the city's main material. During the Jan. 29 opening, the river briefly served as a dance floor for four members of On Tap. A short stroll along the river reveals countless views of different components of the city: a waterfront, a park strip complete with basketball courts, fountains and a Ferris wheel, houses of worship, dangling mobiles, a blimp and short structures that prompt viewers - or tourists - to crouch down before rising to gaze upwards at airy, surreal high-rises.

Butler first taught the course at the Pilchuck Glass School in 2007 with Deborah Czeresko - a glassblower and sculptor known at the international level - with very different results. During the summer of 2008 he invited Czeresko to co-teach the course at Middlebury College as a Cameron Visiting Artist-In-Residence, along with John Chiles, Hank Murta-Adams and Jill Reynolds, all of whom brought to the table extensive knowledge and experience related to using glass as a material for creating art.

The 12 students who enrolled in "City of Your Dreams" hit the ground running on Jan. 5. The first four days of class comprised a whirlwind of introductions ranging from flameworking with Reynolds on campus to trips down to HUB Consolidated - a glass manufacturing company owned by Chiles and operated out of Orwell, Vermont - for a crash course in glassblowing.

"The objective was," Butler explained, "after four days, to have everyone know what it feels like to gather glass out of a furnace that's 2,000 degrees, blow into a pipe and inflate a shape; also, to use small-scale borosilicate glass and a torch at a table and begin to bend and shape clear glass as a three-dimensional line in space. In the evenings I introduced how to melt glass in kilns, and to shape-shift glass on a larger scale using recycled glass and plate glass - common window glass."

The second week entailed appointing three city planners to devise a layout for the installation. The only requirement was to maintain a 1:48 scale (1/4 inch = one foot) throughout the roughly 1,000-square-feet space. Each student was assigned 1.5 blocks of real estate, the goal being to force collaboration between neighbors on shared blocks.

Once materials were brought in, "large amounts of relatively low-rise structures started to appear," Butler explained. "A lot of people didn't like what other people were doing, just like in real life. Or they liked what someone was doing across town and wished it was on their side of the river. As a result of this, one side of the river looks entirely different from the other side. It's as if one side is kind of the classy Park Avenue side and the other side is the funkier, more industrial side with a crazy patchwork of architectural ideas."

Though a veritable wonderland and truly enjoyable vision, the city suffers from the same problem as many of its real-life counterparts: circulation. The grid layout is ultimately useless for visitors; they stand like Godzillas on top of nonexistent suburbs and on the river, unable to move in for closer looks of large chunks of the city. A wide boulevard evoking Paris would have made the city inherently more walkable. Sobriety seems to be in short supply here as well, as evidenced by a critical mass of distracting beer and liquor bottles. The greatest offenders were a hanging structure of flattened Red Stripe bottles and a conspicuous Svedka bottle that do nothing but remind viewers of the student body's stereotypical drinking habits.

Strangely absent from the city? Inhabitants. Though the city teemed with people during the opening, no miniature glass humans jaywalked across side streets or walked hand-in-hand through the park next to buildings made from sliced bottles, beakers and thin tubes. Some might argue that the tube of glass people shooting up to the second floor of Johnson contradicts this observation, but these people emerged from a combined height and abstract concept requirement introduced in the third week. Those people came from a random prompt assigned to that particular student: "the dead." Another prompt -"carnal thoughts" - resulted in an exquisite floral construction hanging down from the second floor.

The installation raises questions about how individuals conceptualize urban forms. Taking into account the dominance of glass, the city strikes a delicate balance between the realistic and the imaginary, a line complicated by the ironic use of a standard architectural model scale.

"First it's about making art," said Butler. "It's about making sculpture. It's also equally about making and tracking human interaction on a sociological, creative, artistic and political level. So at the same time this is about sculpture, it's also a microcosm of how human beings organize themselves - how we all do."

"City of Your Dreams" is on view in the Pit Space in the Johnson Memorial Building until Monday, Feb. 16. It is free and open to the public.