Art in Architecture - Anne lindberg's - Curtain wall

[ Music ] >> You know perhaps what brings me the most useful information and experience that find its way into my studio are simple movements through the world, like playing the piano, ice skating, read poetry, or listening to music. [ Music ] I suppose I have course-bound touchstones in art by other artists, yet somehow things like playing the piano are more resonant in qualities like structure, pattern, rhythm, lyrical motion, things like that, that are in my work. [ Music ] >> Internationally acclaimed artist, Anne Lindberg, has designed a glass piece entitled Curtain Wall. To be installed at the Richard Bolling Federal Building located at 601 East 12th Street, in Kansas City, Missouri. As part of the GSA's art and architecture program. The piece was commissioned as part of an overall American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ARRA renovation project located at the Bolling Building. Lindberg's work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad. Including the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Drawing Center in New York City, and the venues in New Zealand, Norway, Brazil, Canada, and Japan. Lindberg was born in 1962 in Iowa City, Iowa. Where here parents were beginning their professional academic lives at the University of Iowa. Her father was a professor of geography at the university, and her mother was an artist. Lindberg attended Miami University in Ohio for undergraduate studies, eventually majoring in studio art. She then became an intern at the Smithsonian Institution, where she worked with a collection of West African textiles that had just been gifted to the museum. She later did graduate work at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where she earned a masters of fine arts degree in 1988. [ Paper Crinkling ] [ Background Sounds ] [ Music ] >> Lindberg's piece is a four-story, art glass wall commission running the entire length of the Bolling Building's escalators. The project began with the original design of the metal grid to frame in glass panels into a large pattern. Lindberg's idea was to add color and etching to the glass. It is a true marriage of art and architecture, as the art is incorporated into the original architectural concepts. Each run of glass was developed as a set of colors in basic stripes. The color designs were created on a computer using Adobe Photoshop. [ Music ] >> What Anne did here, it was taking something that I think was going to be very rich by itself, but the realization here is an opportunity for public art on a very, very grand scale that is just going to be, I think, a magnet for those people that are transitioning and walking through the space. [ Background Sounds ] >> The imagery for the glass panels encourages a sense of rhythm as one moves from floor to floor. The escalators lead to the primary public floors of the building. For Lindberg, it made sense to fill the space with color and exuberance. [ Music ] >> I was struck by the potential of integrating color, pattern, movement into the gridded glass wall of the escalators that were already designed by the architect. The imagery is like fabric, or curtain, matrix structure that works as a fold. Yet each individual panel of the glass is unique. People of many backgrounds and experiences also work in the Bolling Building and the escalator seems to embody the movement of these people up and down, and through the building. [ Music ] >> I think one of the most fascinating and remarkable things about the art installation at the Richard Bolling Federal Building is the seamless integration of the artist's work to the architecture. The architects during the planning and design of the space, planned and countered on an art installation following this cadence through the escalator lobbies without actually designing the art itself. The artist was then able to come in and seamlessly integrate and fulfill the expectations of that installation, whereas, typically, an artist is giving a location within the building, and then says, create to that level. Well in this case, it's been a seamless integration. I think it is probably the best way to put it. [ Background Sound ] >> Lindberg also incorporated glass etching into her process. Lindberg made the decision about which panels of glass would also have the front layer etched with a drawing pattern. The etched drawings were created with a digital drawing tablet that is pressure sensitive. Allowing the vertical lines to vary in width, as a stroke was made with a stylist paint. [ Background Sound ] [ Music ] >> I began the sweeping arrangements of color to give each double horizontal row of glass its own identity. And then from these basic color decisions, I repeatedly manipulated the density and openness and stripes to finally arrive at the right composition. Some very narrow, some wider, to change the sense of speed and movement. [ Music ] >> The glass was ultimately printed at a glass shop in Chicago called Skyline Design. It has been completed and has been shipped and installed at the Bolling Federal Building. [ Music ] >> The General Services Administration's Art and Architecture Program commissions American artists working in close consultation with architectural design teams to create major artworks that are appropriate to our federal buildings. Architecturally integrated art commissioned for federal buildings has been an American tradition since 1855, when Congress hired Constantino Brumidi to paint fresco for the major expansion at the U.S. Capital in Washington, DC. The process for review and selection of artists followed guidelines developed over the past four decades. GSA allocates one-half of one percent of the estimated construction costs of newer substantially renovated federal buildings for funding works of art. For each project GSA relies on the project-specific panel composed of local and national art professionals such as museum directors, curators, artists and scholars, believed design architect, federal clients, and community representatives, as well as GSA associates to assist in the commissioning process. [ Music ]