GORDON HUETHER + PARTNERS CREATES 50-FOOT ART GLASS RAILING FOR NEW CHARLES SCHWAB BUILDING IN SAN FRANCISCO

50-Foot Steel Rail Frames Series of 12 Glass Art Pieces in One of San Francisco’s Largest Public Art Installations

NAPA, CA (July 17, 2001) – Gordon Huether + Partners of Napa, California, one of the West’s leading fine art studios, today announced the public unveiling of a series of 12 separate abstract artworks in glass, which are encased in a 50-ft. long steel railing at the public entrance of the new Charles Schwab & Co. building in downtown San Francisco. The artwork is comprised of 12 panels of double-paned glass, each four feet long and three feet high.

Artist Gordon Huether designed the series of pieces from close-up photographs he took of urban streetscapes, manipulated through computer graphics programs to expose "the beauty found in ordinary, everyday things." Combining etched and fused techniques, each panel interprets a photo from a series created by Huether of such common urban sights as cracks in sidewalks and peeled paint on walls and gates.

GH+P was selected to create the outdoor glass installation to run across the front of a mixed-use 1920s-era building that was retrofitted by HOK Architects/San Francisco, one of the nation’s leading architectural and engineering firms, for Charles Schwab & Co. The building is a clean-lined modern/minimalist design clad in champagne-colored metallic panels. The natural green cast of the glass complements the metallic surfaces, but the etched ruggedness of the urban art with the spots of color in the compositions draw attention to the public entrance of the building. Gordon Huether said, "The building is beautiful and refined, so the art knocks off the edge a little."

The installation, at the corner of Howard and Fremont Streets in the heart of San Francisco’s burgeoning South of Market (SOMA) area bordering the Financial District, is widely visible to the daily parade of commuters making their way into town from the Oakland/Bay Bridge. Gordon Huether was specially chosen to create the art by architect Steve Worthington of HOK, who worked with Huether on a previous project.

"Gordon always surprises, and at the Charles Schwab building he tells a new urban story, about finding beauty in the everyday," said Worthington. "The pieces stand on their own–each one is akin to a portrait or a landscape that shows you what it’s made of and pulls you away at the same time."

Huether manipulated his photos in the Adobe PhotoShop program on a Macintosh, then outputted the images to an Iris printer. Artisans in the Napa studio of Gordon Huether + Partners used sandblasting, layering of glass colors, kiln fusing, and other techniques to transform the Iris prints into three dimensions, and in the process create unique new stand-alone works of art in glass.

The sculptural pieces have a consistent modern, minimalist appearance, using clear glass as a negative space for the play of elements layered upon them. A stain on a sidewalk, the weathered remains of painted numbers on a flaking sign, a crack in scuffed concrete, become suggestive messages and icons of clear beauty in Huether’s eye. Sandblasting etches away the shiny glass surface to form the background of each panel, giving the group a worn, yet ethereal feel. Some pieces have clots of colored glass layered and fused to the clear glass surfaces by a high-fire kiln in the studio. Pale, scoured colors of glass, worn-denim blues, pale olives, are layered and melted to the grainy backdrop of the panels, their subtly shifting spectrum suggesting a richness that lies beneath the surface, the way a building’s façade cloaks the activities within.

"I took the color out, or I isolated where I had the color in," said artist Gordon Huether. "This is urban art: it’s essence is urban, it comes from the urban. As art, it lends itself to integration into architecture, because it’s also translucent and transmits light.

"This personifies urban art," continued Huether. "We’ve gotten beyond thinking of life in the city as ordinary or ugly–because you can visually crop it. Incredible opportunities can be created by limitations. I called the series I made on the Iris printer ‘Altered Perceptions.’ Find the extraordinary in the ordinary, in common structural and natural found elements. This is urban because it’s a movie, a public movie with frames–just walk past it and the frames flow past you."

The architect commissioned Gordon Huether + Partners to create the glass railing art in winter 2000. The studio’s project manager, Amy Mortimore, worked with the metal contractor to plan the installation and put the railing up with the glass art integrated into it.

The SOMA district, for decades a wasteland of crumbling warehouses, auto repair garages and weedy lots, underwent a transformation in the nineties with the phenomenon of the dot-com explosion. Just as the dot-commers were transforming SOMA into Multimedia Gulch, the gritty streets bordering the Financial District became the home of new high rises offices and condos. The Charles Schwab building is part of this historic migration of traditional business into the area.

About Gordon Huether + Partners

Gordon Huether + Partners is one of only a few studios that expands the intimate fine art medium of the painted canvas into large-scale formats using glass, found objects, and other materials. Founded in the Napa Valley in 1986, Gordon Huether + Partners is contributing to the emergence of glass as a fine art medium. Gordon Huether has won a number of public art commissions, including the San Bruno Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Station, San Bruno, Calif.; the TIAA/CREF headquarters, Charlotte, North Carolina; and the Elihu Harris State Building, Oakland, Calif.

The mission of Gordon Huether + Partners is to contribute to the emergence of glass as a fine art medium and to help evolve its use, as well as the use of found objects, metal, and other non-traditional mediums, together with the traditional fine art palettes of painting and sculpture. The studio has grown to be one of the largest and most innovative fine art studios on the West Coast.

Gordon Huether + Partners, founded in 1986 in the Napa Valley in Northern California, includes the principals Gordon Huether and Christine Stone, who are painters, glass artists, sculptors and illustrators; various guest artists; and numerous expert craftspeople who are developing new techniques for working with glass and metal, and are establishing innovative creative contexts for its use.

Gordon Huether + Partners is one of only a few studios that expands the intimate fine art medium of the painted canvas into large-scale formats including architectural installations. Mr. Huether, Ms. Stone, other partners and their associates apply the fine art sensibility and techniques usually found on canvas or in small art pieces to large-scale glass and metal installations and freestanding sculpture.

Gordon Huether + Partners created art pieces for Spago Restaurant in Beverly Hills, the Oracle Corporation headquarters in Silicon Valley, Stanford Biomedical Center in Palo Alto, Tendo Chapel in Japan, J Wine in Sonoma, Silverado Winery in Napa, and in the private homes of Oracle founder and CEO Lawrence Ellison, Ambassador Kathryn Hall, and collector Diane Disney Miller. Gordon Huether is the artist-in-residence at the Artesa Winery in Napa. A new show of his large freestanding glass and steel sculptures and paintings and assemblages on canvas and board, opened May 17 at the TIAA-CREF corporate gallery in New York. He recently produced a one-man show of mixed media at the Andrea Schwartz Gallery in San Francisco. The studio has also fabricated a large-scale architectural installation in glass for Cesar Pelli at the Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, and art glass doors for the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

PROJECT TEAM

Owner: Charles Schwab & Company
Architect: HOK Architects
Design Director: Steve Worthington, San Francisco Office
Project Designer: Lynn Filar
Project Architect: Matthew Winkelstein
Artist: Gordon Huether
General Contractor: Webcor Builders, Gerald Tugade
Metal Fabricators: Romak Iron Works, Danny Sutton
Glazing Contractor: AGA Glass, Dennis Jean, Project Manager

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URBAN ART: REFLECTIONS AND RE-IMAGININGS

Glass Art Railing, Charles Schwab Building, 215 Fremont Street — San Francisco

By Gregory Kerwin and Gordon Huether

The urban art project by Gordon Huether at 215 Fremont Street in San Francisco is a series of 12 individual panels of glass art, which are suspended in a 50-ft. long steel-frame railing across the raised front entrance of the Charles Schwab building.

Unveiled in July 2001, the artwork is comprised of 12 panels of specially designed glass, each four feet long and three feet high. The artwork, combining etched and fused glass techniques, depicts images of what Huether refers to as "the beauty found in ordinary, everyday things." Each panel is an interpretation of a photo from a series created by Huether of found images from the urban environment, such as cracks in sidewalks, peeled paint, and rusted metal.

The 215 Fremont installation helps to redefine urban art, a term applied to many phenomena of city life including graffiti on subway cars and colorful wall murals. Urban art is often associated with poverty and disadvantage, with cultural "outsiders.," It is the medium of expression for those with no access to the art studio, the academy, or the gallery. Urban art fights urban blight with color and decorationcommentary–this kind of urban art is a reaction to physical and psychic ugliness, an attempt to deal directly with the setting and not some abstract concept of the setting.

Urban art has been described as controversial, political, public, revolutionary. The Latino muralists of the West Coast, whose style of wall painting can now be found throughout the U.S., depict struggle and heroism in bright colors and broad strokes that pay homage to the post-revolutionary Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera. New heroes like Cesar Chavez blend with representations of street life. These socio/political murals paved the way for a new expression of fine art in public places.

Urban art walks a fine line: to be valuable and significant, it cannot be demeaning or patronizing. It should also not distract from reality–some urban art is seen as an attempt to put a gloss on poverty, overcrowding, and congestion.

Artist Gordon Huether views urban art as a way to help people expand how they see. Gordon Huether’s vision was of a streetside "gallery," to present the Fremont Street driver or passerby with a series of 12 individual works of art in glass panels, mounted in a series for viewing uniquely or as a group, so a viewer could walk down the street and look at the paintings one by one like walking through a museum or gallery.

"To me 215 Fremont personifies urban art," said Huether. "The grit from the sidewalk, the bent-up parking meter or the peeling billboard, the homeless guy sitting under the bridge next to the graffiti–they’re a part of our urban experience. We have gotten into the habit of seeing those things as ugly, but you can look at those things a little bit differently, simply by just framing and cropping them. I called my photo series that inspired the glass art ‘Altered Perceptions’ because I was trying to help people expand the way they see."

In creating the photo series, Huether was inspired by gritty tableaus he found and photographed in the urban environment: cracks in concrete sidewalks; a water buoy floating in front of a rusted steel sheet; a spray-painted screen over a broken window; parking lot asphalt with chipped numbers and stripes; peeled wallpaper; a wrinkled plastic sheet covering a window.

Huether scanned the photographs, altered them on a computer, and created digital color prints for a show at a gallery exhibit. To convert the altered photos into glass art, Huether first isolated an interesting zone in each image and boosted charged it with color and texture. He used filters and played with color hues to emphasize the key parts in each panel, then designed a delicately etched background to support the color and texture at the focus.

The architect’s concept for the Charles Schwab Building was that the transparency of the building expresses to the city what’s going on inside its four walls. Gordon Huether translated that idea in a similar medium, scaled down to street level. Huether said, "It has to do with the material. Glass is so sympathetic to architecture, it’s a medium that loans itself to integration into architecture, because it’s translucent, it manipulates light."

Gordon Huether’s intent was to provide a permeable border between the street and the taut, refined minimalist structure of the 215 Fremont building. From Huether’s point of view, he wanted to "take the edge off the building, knock the polish off a bit, to say, ‘Hey, there are people here walking on the sidewalks and working in this building.’"

The setting of the art is highly visible–thousands of commuters view it daily as they stream off the freeway at one of only a few entries to downtown San Francisco. Pedestrian traffic flows past, workers walking from bus stops and baseball fans strolling to PacBell Park.

Huether "listened" carefully to the street and the setting–the message is that the building is a part of the city and the street. Huether’s art has a similar message as the street’s: it’s fluid, not static. The art is a cooperative medium involving architects and interior designers to create a detailed yet integrated, unified image.

The art installation works with the building because of the atmospheric, semi-opaque and transparent glass medium. The 50-foot scale of the art complements the glass-fronted building. The building and the art panels send similar messages: each is like a running strip of film, or individual still frames. The scope of Huether’s work relative to the streetscape seems larger than it is–the glass medium allows the art to be spread thinly, but comes across as larger than life.

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