Re(Calibrator) Phase9

In pursue of the right glass technique for the execution of the final design, I paid a visit to various cold glass workshops.

Cold glass workshop

The common cold glass technique is  fairly straight forward; the 3D shape is formed by  layering  flat glass sheets.

Glass sculture by Peter Newsome 

This method is like the manual equivalent of Rapid Prototyping, only instead of powder, the pre-cut glass pieces are placed and glued to form the 3D object. In fact, the material layering technique is quite often employed by architects and planners in their scale models.

London Residential Density model by R. Burdett (LSE)

Each layer  is designed and developed individually. First a decision is made about the thickness of the  glass, since this inevitably  creates  steps,  then each layer is cut, sanded and cleaned with solvent. Afterwards the pieces are glued together with UV glue, sometimes a heat gun is used to get rid of air bubbles. This method  provides a great ability to control the process,which is something that  is perhaps less possible with hot glass. However this technique  is immensely time consuming  and if I decide to go with the cold forming technique, then would look into potentially digitalizing some of  the manual part of the process.
Meanwhile, here  are the basics of this method.

The common way of cutting glass is with  the use of  a glass cutter; the area is lubricated with oils before the cut, to protect  the blade.

"cutting the glass" with a knife

Even though the process is called glass cutting, we dont actually cut the  glass, but scratch and brake it.  (page33, The Glass Artist's Studio Handbook, Cecilia Cohen, 2011).
An automatic glass saws are  also available, there is a constant water lubrication going on with  this cutting process,to protect  the glass from overheating and breaking.

The automatic glass cutter

The water lubrication process applies to a big bench saw too,  when sanding the corners of the piece.

Glass polishing

In glass grinders and drills, normally the heads are made of diamond.

The diamond heads

After these workshops, I was tempted to simulate the cold glass making process for the geometry I am intending to fabricate and to see what it will look like if I was to go with this method.
For this purposes, I First dissected a portion of the geometry and separated it from the rest. 

Selecting a piece of geometry

Afterwards I measured and spaced the sheets of glass that I will be needing for the cutting.

The glass layers created in 3Ds Max

 Then I cut into each layer of glass, assuming that I will be doing the same with the real glass and then reassembled them together.

Layers of glass with different shapes

The results are looking like these.

The projected view of the layered glass object

This is of course not the real representation of the sculpture generated with cold technique, as here I could not achieve the "stepped" effect, but this gives a hint on what this may look like.

Different colour glass with various opacities

Since the geometry that I am trying to achieve is very flowing and organic, this technique seems to contradict to the fluidity of the shape, with its orthodox linearity. I feel that the cold glass layering method, although relatively easy to achieve, perhaps is not right for this particular shape. There are other disadvantages too ; its does not allow for an interior space as the glass is filled through the whole volume of the shape, thus making it extremely heavy and "inhabitable". There is of course a great potential in this technique, but I believe this needs to be combined with another method to achieve more complete and richer structure.