Press Release: Stephen Glassman Studio

Inspired by the Adjacent Hudson River, Flows Two Ways Sculpture Connects the Built and Natural Environments

Los Angeles, CA – February 9, 2016 - Stephen Glassman Studio (SGStudio) today announced a commission from The Durst Organization (TDO) for a monumental outdoor sculpture for Manhattan’s new “superblock” development, 57 West, located at West 57th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues. Flows Two Ways (2016) is TDO’s first site-specific commission, and continues the organization’s enduring support of the arts. Scaling eight stories at sixty-by-sixty feet, the work will denote the main entrance to VIA 57 WEST, the torqued tetrahedral residential and mixed-use “courtscraper” that marks Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)’s first project in the Americas. Installation will begin in March 2016 in anticipation of VIA’s spring opening.

The work is named after a loose translation of the Hudson River’s Native American name, Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk – “the river that flows both ways” and serves as a metaphor for two forces that are separate yet connected: the river and the city. Flows Two Ways marks Glassman’s first permanent large-scale New York work.

“The history of sculpture and skyscraper in New York City is unique and powerful, and I’m honored to be working with the Dursts and BIG on this project,” said artist Stephen Glassman. “As a New York native, the movement to save the Hudson River was formative in my growth as an artist intent on creating works of scale and social impact. Flows Two Ways expresses an enduring regard for earth and nature, a love of New York, and a spirit of creativity and generosity that is at the cornerstone of the Durst family.”

Flows Two Ways extends Glassman’s consistent exploration of gesture, scale, social impact, and the individual’s essential relationship to the horizon, which is already at play within New York’s skyscraper landscape. For decades, Glassman has created large-scale public sculptures, using a gestural language rooted in his private studio drawing practice. He is particularly known for his free-form, structural bamboo site-works in urban areas struck by natural and social disasters, which are designed to carry the viewer’s eye upward to the sky and strike a balance between control and accident, gravity and weightlessness, mass and velocity.

Flows Two Ways is sited on the western wall of HELENA 57 WEST, the first residential tower built on the W57 superblock in 2005, immediately east of VIA, facing and signifying the VIA entrance. At 3,600 square feet, Flows Two Ways will draw viewers’ eyes up along its eight-story expanse, to the sky and across the topography of the buildings to the open space of the Hudson. Aluminum, stainless steel, and rolled metal tubing evoke the river’s movement. Cascading forms reference the dualities of flowing and falling, and are made structurally possible through innovative state-of-the-art metal technologies that forge the sculpture’s organic shapes. Transforming with the sun’s changing angles, the artwork mimics the Hudson’s glow at sunset. The sculpture’s palette, derived through color studies by and referencing the historic Hudson River School, imbues 57 West with an organic counterpoint to the steel and glass built environment.

To realize Flows Two Ways, Glassman created small studies in stone and bamboo to begin to extend the work into three dimensions. “My inquiry is the intuitive gesture on a civic scale, to humanize the built environment,” said Glassman. “The 57 West development is remarkable in that the sky touches the ground throughout the entire block, which is akin to living in a mountain landscape. Flows Two Ways is designed to strike a chord with the architecture and generate a sense of space and quality of a landscape environment – albeit a built and vertical one.”

“The Durst Organization has a long history of supporting the arts and the environment in New York, and Flows Two Ways will continue this tradition on Manhattan’s Far West Side,” said Jonathan (Jody) Durst, the President of The Durst Organization. “We selected Stephen to create a complimentary work soon after commissioning Bjarke Ingels for VIA. Stephen has made a career transforming the built environment, and Flows Two Ways will offer Far West Side residents and visitors a figurative east-facing river vista.”

To develop the technologically complex Flows Two Ways sculpture, Glassman and his engineering, architecture, and design teams crafted a layered construction and anchoring system, effectively a panelized façade. Design considerations were made for optimal transportation, handling, and installation. The layered eight-story, 32,000-pound jig-saw puzzle is composed of a stainless-steel mounting matrix embedded into the existing HELENA wall, 35 interlocking aluminum panels, nearly 400 sixty-foot pipe clusters rolled and flowing in three axes, and faceted metal “boulders.” A sophisticated sliding plate system that largely floats the 16-ton piece off the building accommodates thermal expansion and forces generated by wind, rain, snow, and ice loads.

Working closely with TDO and their team of builders, Glassman brought on his long-time collaborator, global engineering firm Arup, and commissioned Milgo Bufkin Industrial, a fourth-generation family-owned Brooklyn metal fabricator, to build an architecturally-integrated sculpture that stands the test of time. Flows Two Ways is designed and engineered to the same durability standards as its surrounding buildings.

Glassman first came to international attention while creating large-scale bamboo installations in urban sites devastated in the wake of the Rodney King Riots, Malibu Fires, and Northridge Quake. These works became local symbols of resiliency as well as a springboard for the permanent, large-scale public works he creates today. Based in downtown Los Angeles, Stephen Glassman Studio is the production center of visual artist Stephen Glassman. The studio’s practice is “rhizomatic”— a collective of designers, architects, engineers, specialists, fabricators, and clients engaging in strategies that seamlessly integrate gesture, place, and form to create artworks of scale and social impact. Significant projects by Glassman include a 4,000-square-foot sculpture plaza for the LNR Warner Center in Los Angeles; Southeast Shear (an NEA/White House Millennium commission in Arkansas); the Sylvia Campuan Bridge in Indonesia; Thornton Creek in Seattle; Frozen River in Calgary; Dos Picos in Los Angeles’ El Cariso Park, among others. An avid collaborator, Glassman has worked with artists and organizations ranging from Paris Opera, The Moscow Circus, Bread and Puppet Theatre, Jonathan Borofsky, Phillipe Petite, Gemini Gel, Nels Cline, and Eric Owen Moss, among others. Additional information on Glassman and SGStudio can be found at http://sgstudio.la/