Growing Panes: Stained Glass in Identity Crisis?

Transparent, crystalline and ethereal. Since the emergence of the International Style nearly a century ago, glass has reigned at one corner of modern architecture’s triumvirate of materials. Yet the vanishing qualities that so appealed to Modernists represent only one side of the material and its history. In the aftermath of the Second World War, architects and designers worked to exalt glass’s tangibility and to recover its capacity as a bearer of narrative and meaning. Between Spence’s reconstruction of Coventry Cathedral, Eiermann’s new Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and Chagall’s window for the United Nations, stained glass became saturated with the pacifying post-war sentiment of memorialisation.

There was more to these commissions, however, than a wish to resurrect what was destroyed in the conflict. They also demonstrate a desire to return to a place of psychological safety. As a medium, stained glass is associated with a simpler world of universal faith and morals, where good and evil are clearly defined. Consolidated by the 19th-century Gothic Revival, the format speaks largely to religious images of devotion, sacrifice and piety. These are of course the same connotations that provocateur artists Gilbert & George have worked to unseat since the 1970s with their lurid photomontages. Appropriating the visual format of medieval stained glass, their work has abstracted a pornographic visual vocabulary from the progress of the sexual liberation movement.

If then we’re to consider stained glass as a barometer of the cultural moment – whether daring, fearful or hedonistic – what sentiment can we read in its contemporary resurgence? Perhaps the rise signifies another traditionalist reaction to a moment of societal uncertainty? This may well be half the story, but I also detect an identity crisis within the medium itself. Compelled to respond to a world of digitised fabrication, stained glass stands at a critical junction, fizzing with the energy of disorientation. What will be its next move? A turn back to the safe territory of tradition or a committed march towards the new avant-garde?

If the latest project from renowned duo Studio Job is anything to go by, practitioners seem unwilling to be pigeonholed either way. The design firm recently created a set of 15 stained-glass windows for The Jane, a new restaurant in their hometown of Antwerp. The commission sits in line with the broader philosophy of the project’s architect, Piet Boon, who was committed to using only materials that ‘age beautifully’. This concern for longevity stems largely from the building’s complex history as the chapel of a former military hospital – a tale Studio Job were commissioned to bring to life in an echo of the didactic role historically played by church windows.

While the images stretching across the over 500 glass panels might initially appear an odd jumble – fried eggs, gas masks and butterflies – in time their logic emerges, from the crucified Christ to a shackled devil beneath. Indeed, it’s this negotiation of tradition and innovation that wins the project its success. Church conversions are notoriously difficult to get right, but here the building’s symbolism and spatial hierarchy is carried gracefully from one episode of its life to another. In this latest incarnation, Boon has even replaced the altar with an open kitchen – the glutton’s modern shrine.

While the new windows boast an eclecticism akin to an aesthete’s Hard Rock Café (in the most complimentary sense), the project does resonate with Studio Job’s broader ideological approach to design. When compared with the special 65th anniversary commemorative Defender they created for Land Rover, it becomes clear that Studio Job’s use of stained glass constitutes more than a decorative sensibility. It’s a key ingredient in the potent iconographical elixir in which they bathe their works. The firm’s appropriation of stained glass into their blend of interdisciplinary processes does, however, subject them to an increasingly worn question: is the technique art or design?

While I’m largely against this branch of label-based ontological navel-gazing, a new crop of work has recently reignited the debate. William Lamson’s Solarium, for example, makes a convincing case for expanding the artistic applications of stained glass. Perhaps riffing on the candy house of the Brothers Grimm, Lamson created the varied hues for his structure by caramelising sugar to a set of different temperatures. By sandwiching 162 panes of crystallised sugar between layers of protective glass, the New York-based artist has been able to form a most unusual glass house.

The growth of experiments like this (based, by Lamson’s own admission, largely on trial-and-error) represents a ‘third way’ in the search for stained glass’s future. It signifies a marriage of traditional craft skill with material innovation. In fact, both the design and location of the Solarium speak to this sense of balancing old and new. Situated on the crest of a hill an hour north of New York City, it represents the archetypal outpost – like a mountain chapel or Thoreau’s one-room cabin.

Considered alongside Studio Job, Lamson’s work demonstrates the self-awareness of today’s practitioners. Stained glass is not an easy field to fall into – those in it, therefore, have taken the deliberate decision to be part of its contemporary reinvention. More than anything their creations remind us that the technique’s power transcends its materiality. Just as architecture is as much about negative space as built form, the impact of stained glass is a marriage between the two-dimensional pane and the light that passes through it. So while developments in fabrication may continue to disturb artisanal convention and conservative symbolism, the phenomenological magic of stained glass means that it’s here to stay.