In Vitro
The Many Lives of Glass
We always look through glass but rarely at glass. It is now ubiquitous as a building material, but it once brought color to everyday life. The church windows told the stories of who we are and how we should behave. Today, the use of glass in architecture is generally prosaic: a material that transmits light and connects indoors and outdoors.
In a practical sense, the use of glass offers opportunities for making new and old buildings more sustainable. Ever since industrialization, the aura of modernity has been associated with the use of glass. The future is seen in glass, the material is technologically innovated, but the old crafts are also preserved, perhaps expressed in new forms.
In Limburg, glass had a clear meaning in the creation of a regional visual identity. The city of Roermond played the leading role as a glassmaking center that also sold its product beyond the provincial borders. This was reflected in the typical stained glass skylights and the exuberant expressionist church windows of the Limburg School with luminaries such as Joep Nicolas, Charles Eyck and the Atelier Flos to contemporary architects such as Wiel Arets, Francine Houben, Mathieu Bruls and Jo Coenen.
This exhibition explores the use of glass in architecture in all its different manifestations. On the one hand, this can be a local and traditional material, but also an industrial product that has an indelible influence on how we interact with each other, with architecture and with the nature around us. In the exhibition we bring together archive material and old stained glass with introspective installations and films that explore the shine and layering of glass. Modern Limburg architecture is shown with designs and models in the context, philosophy and symbolic importance of glass.
Glass for the mind Glass has told stories from the beginning. In illiterate times, stained glass windows in churches provided text and explanations for the unintelligible Latin mass. Later, when window glass also becomes available to the middle class, the material also expresses prosperity. The purple glass that you see in some canal houses in Amsterdam, for example, is a symbol of wealth, but in many cases also fake.
The Catholic community in the Netherlands emancipated itself in the mid-19th century: a period that is sometimes called 'the Rich Roman Life'. The diocese of Roermond was restored, the Catholic experience and thus the culture flourished. The studios of architect Pierre Cuypers and glazier Frans Nicolas, who were much talked about in this movement, regularly worked together from the 1850s onwards. The architectural style referred to the late Middle Ages and that caught on: the Gothic was given a revival in the Neo-Gothic, with Limburg roots. However, contemporary secularization means that a lot of glass loses its function and place and life ends in small depots. At Bureau Europa you will soon be able to wander through the Limburg glass depot yourself, looking for orphaned pieces of stained glass.
Political charge The stained glass depot brings together the many shards from the neo-Gothic heyday of glass art. It is problematic heritage: restoration is difficult, also because of the demands of our time. Stained glass is simply difficult to implement in triple glazing. The province would prefer to get rid of it. Glass is not only causing headaches in Limburg. With her research and film, Batoul Faour portrays the devastation after the massive explosion in Beirut in 2020, which covered the city under a carpet of glass for months. The broken glass is a metaphor for the fragile political situation in Lebanon.
In her film White Heart, Christien Meindertsma zooms in on a bead with that name, which was used for centuries in colonial barter trade and with which a system of exploitation could be set up. Today the beads are produced in Bohemia and are still incorporated into native art in America, in a highly traditional manner. The film sensitively portrays the globalization of a material, but also the history of exploitation.
Inside and outside After the industrial revolution, the view on health changed: a good life requires peace, space and light. In Maastricht, Petrus Regout started equipping his factories with glass roofs and floors, and he even made the first gas pipes from glass. Later, the tuberculosis pandemic was combated with light and air, which is reflected in the architecture of sanatoriums. Many glass walls ensured that sunlight could reach the room with a horizontal focus because patients mainly lay on beds. The style of the furniture was sleek. This is practical and promotes breathing. Sanatorium visitors were the influencers of the time and the style spread like wildfire.
Architecture developed further when x-ray photography was invented, after 1900. Just as an x-ray shows the inside of the body, architecture turns the interior outward through the use of glass walls. The boundary between inside and outside, between private and public, is blurring. The architecture as we knew it seemed to disappear. This rigorous approach was also one of the hallmarks of the eminent and influential Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from Aachen. Contemporary architect Wiel Arets responds to this with his theory of the Alabaster Skin. Everyone is a voyeur, the act of looking itself is problematized – or even disciplined: after all, the Dutch (Calvinist) sun-drenched house offers full insight into private life, as proof of righteousness.
Layered glass The introduction of glass in architecture therefore represents an Umwertung aller Werte. The architecture disappears as soon as it appears, the glass wall is the membrane that separates the chaotic from the ordered. With the advent of electricity, light no longer comes from outside, but from within. Frits Peutz's Glass Palace in Heerlen is a celebration of modern construction and an expression of the merchant spirit and modernity. It is ironic that the glass architecture of sanatoriums was intended to be an antidote to modernity - and Wiel Arets' Maastricht Art Academy also uses glass as a barrier: an impenetrable film between the colorful artist's studio and the rigid city fabric.
But glass architecture also lets nature in: from the TransNaturalHouse by Mathieu Bruls in Beutenaken, which is tailored to the positions of the sun and the outdoor climate for optimal light, to the Swedish concept of the Naturhus, where people live in greenhouses without insulation or heating. Ingeborg Meulendijks created An Arboreous Imprint: relief glasses in which nature is captured in the glass itself and in the Glass Farm in Schijndel by MVRDV and their Crystal Houses in Amsterdam, the boundary between nature and culture, inside and outside, seems to blur.
Ready for the future Although it is an ancient material, glass is continuously developing. As mentioned, the restoration of old glass is difficult, because it is often no longer made in a historical manner. However, with a view to climate adaptation, insulating and renovating stained glass is very important. Glass is a flexible and extremely suitable material for the future, not least because of its durability. It can be sourced locally and recycled endlessly. With her research Made by Insects, Ori Orisun Merhav investigates how the natural insect polymer shellac can be blown into a glass coating. AtelierNL emphasizes that the raw materials for glass can be extracted hyperlocally by working with different types of sand. But sand is a finite resource and this is pointed out in the work of Giuseppe Licari. The mining of sand and silica has a major impact on the local landscape.
But it can also reduce impact: nuclear waste, which remains dangerous for tens of thousands of years, can be stored in ceramic containers, the warning of danger captured in the crystallized glaze surrounding it, as Antye Guenther's ongoing research shows.
The In Vitro exhibition provides an inspired, layered insight into the many lives of glass: from stained glass windows in 19th-century Catholic Limburg to the expressionist Limburg School; from the symbolic layer in contemporary architecture to sustainable material for the future; from local craft to industrial product with global applications in art, fashion, design and health; from the glassmaker as musician to researcher, from novelist to activist.
Duration Saturday, December 16, 2023 to Sunday, June 16, 2024
Location Bureau Europa, platform for architecture and design
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Note for editors (not for publication)
For more information about the content of the exhibition, please contact info@bureau-europa.nl. Curator Remco Beckers and various artists are available for interviews. If you are interested, please contact communications employee Myrthe Leenders, via communicatie@bureau-europa.nl