Top Designers and Glassmakers Present Glass Design Performances on the Vitra Campus During Art Basel 2010

The Corning Museum of Glass presents GlassLab on the Vitra Campus during Art Basel 2010. GlassLab pairs international designers with glassmakers; designers bring glass design concepts and the teams prototype those concepts in live working sessions open to the public. Designers will include Wendell Castle, Tomas Libertiny, Atelier Oi and Jeff Zimmerman.

Corning, NY (Vocus) May 4, 2010

The Corning Museum of Glass will bring GlassLab to the Vitra Design Museum during Art Basel 2010, pairing international designers with Corning Museum glassmakers for a series of collaborative “design performances.” GlassLab design sessions will take place on the newly expanded Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, from June 14 to June 20, 2010. Participating designers will include Atelier Oi, Wendell Castle, Tomas Libertiny and Jeff Zimmerman, among others.

The designers will bring their sketchbooks and concepts and work side-by-side with glassmakers in a unique mobile hotshop developed by The Corning Museum of Glass. The teams will rapidly prototype their design ideas in live sessions, allowing audiences to observe this dynamic interplay and watch the evolution of the designs as they are created.

GlassLab has been featured at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, and at Design Miami/Art Basel Miami. The hot glass design performance program was inspired by glass design workshops presented by the Corning Museum at Domaine de Boisbuchet, a design retreat center that is a cooperative effort of the Vitra Design Museum and the Centre Georges Pompidou, C.I.R.E.C.A. (Centre International de Recherche et d’Education Culturelle et Agricole) in the Charente region of Southwest France.

“GlassLab provides designers rare access to hot glassmaking processes and enables them to experience first hand the full potential of glass as a material for design,” said Rob Cassetti, creative director of The Corning Museum of Glass. “We value the partnership we’ve had in the Vitra Design Museum in presenting GlassLab and are excited to share for the first time this creative exchange with the public at Art Basel.”

GlassLab attendees will also be able to explore the Vitra Campus featuring the Vitra Design Museum and a collection of buildings by nine contemporary architects, including the new VitraHaus by Herzog & de Meuron. The Essence of Things. Design and the Art of Reduction—an exhibition investigating the motifs and motivations of reduction in design—will be on view at the Vitra Design Museum.

About The Corning Museum of Glass
The Corning Museum of Glass (http://www.cmog.org) is home to the world’s most comprehensive collection of glass. Spanning the globe and encompassing more than 3,500 years of human ingenuity, the collection includes masterpieces from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; the great civilizations of Islam, Asia, Europe and the Americas; and the range of artistic movements beginning in the late 19th century and extending to the present day. Interactive exhibits tell the story of life-changing historic advancements and contemporary innovations in glass technology.

Live glassblowing demonstrations (offered at the Museum, on the road in the U.S. and abroad, and at sea on Celebrity Cruises) bring the material to life for audiences of all ages. Daily Make Your Own Glass experiences at the Museum enable visitors to create their own work in a state-of-the-art hot glassmaking studio.

The Museum’s campus includes a year-round glassmaking school and the Rakow Research Library, the world’s foremost archive and reference collection on the history of glassmaking. A center for scholarship, the Museum also publishes glass-focused periodicals, books and exhibition catalogs.

About The Vitra Design Museum

The Vitra Design Museum ranks among the most important museums of design worldwide. It is housed in a remarkable building by the California architect Frank Gehry where the museum stages two to three exhibitions each year on historical and current developments in design. These exhibitions provide visitors with insights into the diversity and significance of design by vividly presenting the inspirations, background information and processes of design while also incorporating related fields such as architecture, art or other cultures. The work of the Vitra Design Museum is informed and guided by its extensive collection of furniture, lighting objects and industrial design, which is one of the largest of its kind. The collection concentrates on industrially manufactured objects and covers the period from 1850 up to the present. Nearly all exhibitions are conceived as travelling exhibitions that are subsequently shown at other leading international institutions. At the Vitra Campus, the museum’s exhibitions are complemented by a wide-ranging programme of events, guided tours and workshops. Daily guided architectural tours of the Vitra Campus allow visitors to view the various buildings by world-renowned architects. Glimpses of the museum’s collection are offered by a small exhibition in the VitraHaus. Here visitors can also purchase miniatures of classic furniture pieces, reeditions of well-known design classics as well as other design products.

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