Stained glass – historical meaning and contemporary solutions
The meaning of the phrase stained glass in the contemporary context has been changing over the last decades with the development of various new technologies and solutions enabling the use of large-scale artistic glass in architecture.
Nowadays, stained glass is often no longer a composition of pieces of colorful, blown glass pieces connected with a lead profile and soldered with tin. Today, these can be multi-colored glass installations made using other technologies, including laminating antique glass to float glass, fusing or slumping. These large-format, contemporary compositions for windows and other architectural applications can also have original structured surfaces as relief glass.
In our workshop, in the 20th and 21st centuries, we have created many “stained glass” compositions using the new fusing and slumping technologies mentioned above, with the addition of our own developed techniques. Each time designed individually, for objects with different functions and visual characters.
In 2006, we created monochromatic “stained glass” windows titled “Electricity” for the building of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology, using the kiln forming technique, where the drawing was developed as a relief cast in glass. The theme refers to the ways of transmitting electricity particles.
In Działdowo, in the local Evangelical-Augsburg church, you can see multi-colored “stained glass” windows made using a similar furnace technique, based on fusing layers of float glass, commonly called fusing, and in our case meaning kiln-formed relief glass of considerable thickness. The large-scale windows’ installations, together with the glass compositions complementing the interior, create a completely unique atmosphere of reflection and concentration.
Another example of “stained glass” made using contemporary techniques is the glass facade of an office building in Wrocław at Krawiecka Street completed in 2009. The installation is a memory of the entrance part of the building that existed in this location before 1939. The construction technique uniquely solves the connections of monochromatic kiln-formed glasses, i.e. the so-called “fusing” of considerable thickness with permanent lamination of artistic work to the architectural glass panels.
Our architectural glass art solutions, in which we propose a contemporary, original version of stained glass, can be seen on many examples of projects from the portfolio:
