Chicago's Omni Hotel

Spanning over 49' and suspended from 5 spots on the ceiling, this sculpture was my first commissioned piece for the Omni Corp.

Outsourcing the welding work that fabricated the "spine", I allowed myself the chance to concentrate on building 40 leaded glass panels for this project. 38 panels were used and 2 were built as back-up. I utilized a system that had me building only four different shapes for the glass panels. This way, I was super-efficient in my studio as I cut out the pieces of glass for the four different shapes at the same time saving my countless hours of redundancy.

Everything was placed inside an 18-wheeled truck and shipped to Chicago from Los Angeles. I flew to Chicago and assembled everything within a week with the help of my uncle, Don Linde.

The Structural Engineering firm that assisted me in this endeavor, Chicago-based Tylk/Gustafson/Reckers/Wilson/Andrews came up with a brilliant concept for attaching the steel "leaves" to the spine. Threaded rod was used as the "stem" of the leaves and they were simply twisted in place, on-site, after the initial steel spine was attached to the ceiling. Holes had been created in the spine every 18" inches so the leaves would have a consistent, uniform look within all the chaos of the shapes & colors. Attaching all the leaves literally took only an hour and a half!

It goes without saying that once this was installed and I was able to see it from Michigan Ave., I was bitten by the large-scale Art Glass Installation bug.