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British practice Zaha Hadid Architects has created a one-off glass sculpture for whiskey distillery The Dalmore, displaying a bottle of the brand’s single malt whiskey.
The work, named Dalmore Light Rare Sculpture II, is the second in a series of works to raise funds for the V&A Museum in Dundee.
The first piece is a 48-piece wood sculpture by kintsugi, designed in 2022 by museum architect Kengo Kuma.
For Zaha Hadid Architects’ work, director Melodie Leung looked at the shape of the whiskey stills used to distill the drink and the movement of the liquid as it swirls in the glass.
“The idea for the swirl shape came to me when I first learned about the stills and the unique copper shapes Dalmore uses to make whiskey,” Leung told Dezeen.
“And, it draws on what we’re all about working in the office, which is this idea of changing speed and velocity,” she continued.
“There’s a three-dimensional swirl in the way it moves. From a formal level, it was very important to me to get the proportions right so that I could spend hours telling a story about the sculptural shape.”
Liang said the complexity of the finished product reflects the process of its creation.
“What’s really important about this project is that we keep revisiting it, and every time we revisit it, we introduce another layer,” she explains.
“So literally, when you look at the sculpture, you see several layers rotating around each other, and then there’s a second layer, which is the ripples. And then there’s a third layer, which is a finer layer of ripples.”
Liang’s goal was to use glass to create a shape that was “on the edge of possibility.”
“It’s a challenge, the shape is always changing,” she said. “There’s a thin layer of glass that moves behind the decanter and a thicker layer of glass on the base on the left, but then it also moves up and cantilevers on the right.”
“It was just about finding them to get as much tension out of the glass as we had originally designed, but also leaving it to what the glass could do,” she continued. “So there’s a tension in working within the constraints of glass and working with an artist’s hands.”
Made from amber cast glass at The Glass Foundry, this intricate piece was crafted in a kiln over a 12-week period and took more than 500 hours to polish.
“I have a feeling that Zaha Hadid Company looked around for someone to make this piece for them, but ultimately they decided on glass,” said Fiaz Elson, creative director of Glass Foundry.
“They couldn’t find anyone, no one would take it – mainly because it would sit in the kiln for about four months,” she continued. “It’s a big challenge to try to create a piece that you don’t know if it’s going to work.”
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