by Tam Putnam

Last week, I went to a party in San Francisco in honor of a glass sculpture. On a nondescript stretch of Valencia Street in the Mission, segments of the enormous sculpture sat, glowing and ethereal, on a truck parked outside the glass studio. It was a shimmering, intricately chaotic piece that reminded me of rows of test tubes or organ pipes; thunderclouds, folded corrugated cardboard, and a Mobius strip gone mad.

Inside the studio, people talked, beers in hand, below more massive twisting glass structures.

The party and the sculptures were the work of Nikolas Weinstein and his crew, who produce pieces that are more about form, structure, and the play of light than what you get with Dale Chihuly’s splashy, colorful revelry. Much of Nik’s work ends up abroad—this one is traveling by container ship to a Norman Foster–designed hotel in Singapore, where it will hang below an oculus, a window-topped dome. Sometimes Nik’s team wants their friends and colleagues to see what they’re up to. Thus the festivities.

At the party, pizzas were being pulled out of an oven whose day job was that of an annealing kiln. (You may ask, What’s that? I did. Like everyone else who worked there, the guy who answered me wore an LED-tipped antenna, which had the combined effect of a roomful of fireflies. He explained that annealing eases hot glass from, say, 1,200 degrees to room temperature, so it won’t break.) There was an elemental Vulcan-at-the-forge quality to the goings-on—Nik’s team performed party tricks like fusing glass tubes over a flame and stretching a bubble of molten glass across the parking lot to hairlike thinness.

Much of that giddy showmanship is possible only after a lot of the experimentation and broken glass that go into translating the artwork in Nik’s imagination into reality. (Below, a model of the sculpture.)

At one point, my husband and I stood beside one of the sculpture’s segments, talking with one of the glass workers, a guy in blond dreads. We heard a delicate, musical tinkle and looked over to see a few tiny shards falling like snow. The dreadlocked guy looked concerned for a moment, then said cheerily, “Welcome to my world.” (Apparently, the crew hadn’t yet stress-tested the piece, which entails piling on lead blankets and videotaping the results, then sending the tape to the London engineering firm Arup. Adjustments are suggested.)

Earlier, my husband had said to Nik, “What you do is solve problems.” And Nik said, “What I do is create problems.” Then he and his team puzzle them out in this inventor’s lab, a cross between Industrial Age workshop and high-tech research facility.

Go to nikolas.net for more of Nik’s work (including vases, lighting, a piece for a Frank Gehry building, and more). 

It’s all about fire: Nik at an oven he constructed in the studio parking lot.