Domaine de Boisbuchet, France
September 13 - 19, 2015
Contradiction and Connectivity Workshop

In 2015, The Corning Museum of Glass comes back to Boisbuchet with its GlassLab – this year directed by renowned designer and educator Josh Owen. The workshop provides a unique opportunity for exploring the endless creative possibilities that glass-making offers within its own strict constraints. While finding your own way how to deal with a material, that inevitably takes part in the design process, you’ll experience the fascinating contradictions of the hard and the liquid, the cold and the hot, the primal and precious.

Team work is key to this workshop in a double sense. One the one hand, a special focus is set combining your individual approaches into innovative communal solutions. On the other hand, GlassLab is an intense team work already by definition, where you’ll be working closely with expert glassmakers from The Corning Museum of Glass in a fully containerized mobile glassmaking studio, which includes the entire glassmaking equipment and is operated with highly efficient energy consumption.

This workshop is intended to focus on glass design and participants will not be directly making glass themselves. Early booking is recommended, as the number of participants will be limited.

Josh Owen is the President of his independent design studio, Josh Owen LLC. He is also Professor and the Chair of the Industrial Design Department at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches both graduate and undergraduate students. He is intimately involved in developing programming across disciplinary lines, most notably under the umbrella of the newly formed Vignelli Center for Design Studies. Owen’s professional projects for international design brands are included in the permanent design collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Chicago Athenaeum, The Corning Museum of Glass, the Denver Art Museum, the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Montreal, the National Museum of American Jewish History, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Taiwan Design Museum in Taipei among others and have won many awards and have been published in numerous design related books, magazines and periodicals. Owen’s studio practice is located where he lives in a small village a few miles down the Erie Canal from his office at RIT.

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Videos: 

Designer Josh Owen describes working at GlassLab during a two-day design session at The Corning Museum of Glass, May 29 - 30, 2012.