Reza Aliabadi

Volta–Momento

There is a famous story by Louis Kahn: if you ask the brick what it wants — “What do you want, brick?” — the brick replies — “I like an arch!” And even if you try to convince it that an arch is too expensive and suggest a beautiful steel or concrete lintel instead,  the brick still insists — “I like an arch!” As a practicing architect, following the footsteps of the great maestro, I have been trying to conduct similar conversations with brick, wood, steel, stone — pretty much all major construction materials. Through these dialogues, I have tried to find a  way to stay faithful to the nature  of the material at hand while imposing a degree of design authority. Even with less rigid materials such as plaster or concrete, there is always a formwork which, to a high degree, secures the outcome. But very recently, working with gaffers  and the inflating molten glass in a hot shop, prototyping a vase,  has pushed me quite out of my comfort zone.

My brain operates in terms of milling, tooling, machining, and casting, often on a Cartesian framework. After all, I am a hardcore Modernist. Yet, white-hot gather spooled at one end of a blowpipe struggling with gravity didn’t go very well with my past learnings. Secondly, architecture is a very slow process; arguably, the making of it is more forgiving. Glass blowing, however, happens impromptu and on a much faster pace; there is no time to go back to a drafting table, make a revision, and issue a change order. In short, it is agile, it is acrobatic, it is hot, and it is glassy!

Very challenging, yes. But as a designer who is a groupie of Vignellis, who always emphasized, “If you can design one thing, you can design everything,” quitting was never an option.  After a few failing attempts,  glass taught me a lesson or two. Only then, I could manage to realize working prototypes,  which, at first glance, may look quite different from each other. I would argue that despite unalike formal expressions, they all emerged, more or less, from the same design principles.