Nikolas Weinstein (born 1968) is a San Francisco-based American glass artist known for his large-scale architectural sculptures. Weinstein’s primary medium is Borosilicate Glass tube which he shapes using a modern kiln casting technique in custom kilns some of which include a computer-operated pin bed. Weinstein's sculptures mimic flowing fabric or origami. Several of Weinstein’s sculptures hang in public buildings in Asia.
Early life
Nikolas Weinstein was born in 1968 in New York City to parents who both had artistic careers. His father, Richard S. Weinstein, worked in urban planning for New York City before moving to Los Angeles to become dean of the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. His mother was a sculptor.
Weinstein received his BA in comparative literature from Brown University in 1990. He also studied at Université de Nantes & École des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France Before glass blowing, Weinstein worked briefly in a stained glass shop in Brooklyn, New York. Later, Weinstein took lessons at a glassblowing shop in Manhattan’s Little Italy neighborhood and became interested in the “smoke and fire” of the trade. Upon returning to Brown, he used extra time in his last semester to enroll in a glassblowing course at Rhode Island School of Design, after which he states he “was hooked.”
After graduation, Weinstein moved to San Francisco and worked as a graphic designer while continuing to blow glass in his free time. He managed to get some of his glassblowing work into a few small design shops. Weinstein’s style of glassblowing builds on nature, shapes, and movement, which interested him from an early age via internships at the NY American Museum of Natural History and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Career
Weinstein’s studio opened in 1991. Since his first large commission, the DZ Bank building at Pariser Platz, Weinstein has become known for his innovations in glass art which he uses to build his large-scale, sculptural glass installations. Weinstein uses a unique four-meter long kiln which he designed himself to fuse and shape glass tubes in one pass. The kiln features a bed covered with discs on rods that can be raised or lowered to shape softened glass. The design was inspired by “pin screens”, the toys that record impressions of a face or hand in a layer of movable pins.
Weinstein, whose designs focus on light, shapes, and movement describes glassblowing as a “team sport” and has 10 to 12 people working on each project, along with an engineer to analyze the stresses on the sculpture and calculate the amount of glass required.
In an interview with GLASS Quarterly, Weinstein stated that all his pieces are in “response to their surrounding architecture” and that [he] “always wanted pieces that were big enough that they would be considered as much an element in a building as the foundation or the façade.”
Notable works
The Pariser Platz Chandelier: DZ Bank Building, Germany
Commissioned in 1996 by architect Frank O. Gehry, the project was Weinstein’s entry into the commercial market, and his first foray into large-scale glass installations. Weinstein designed and constructed a chandelier for the atrium of the DG Bank building in Berlin. The installation consists of 30 “clouds” of glass floating a few meters above the ground. With a total weight of 2.5 tons, an area of more than 2,000 square feet, taking and four years to complete, the installation was one of the largest all-glass sculptures in the world.
To create the sculpture, which filters a mix of sunlight and artificial light, Weinstein enlisted an expert team including a man who designed windows for the space shuttle, a builder of mirrors for the Hubble Space Telescope, and a physicist who models random processes. Together they designed a brand new kiln and special software to assemble the “clouds.”
To test the safety of hanging huge glass sculptures overhead in public buildings, Weinstein worked with Herb Miska, who designed windows for airlines. During his testing, Miska noted that the glass did not shatter easily, and upon further study, realized that the glass panels behaved “like old Spanish forts built of coral, whose porous material was great at absorbing the impact of cannon balls, with all the energy of an impact being dissipated through the many tiny natural breaks.” He deduced that Weinstein had created a sculpture with “fortress-like strength” and that the panels wouldn’t fail catastrophically in a construction accident.” The piece has been called “unparalleled in the whole world.”