Glass Art Chandelier by Claudia Phipps x Shopkit
Shopkit’s design and installation teams recently had the pleasure of working with Claudia Phipps, a very talented UK based glass artist, when she asked us to help her realise her original concept drawings for a giant suspended glass art chandelier.
Shopkit recently had the pleasure of working with Claudia Phipps to help bring her designs for an glass art chandelier to life.
Claudia’s design featured three clusters of many beautiful coloured glass discs that she was creating in different sizes that were to be fixed at different distances from a central stem that snaked its way down from the ancient plastered ceiling of the entrance hall of the Wycombe Abbey Girl’s School in Buckinghamshire.
Due to the design of the Chandelier we had to build it entirely in situ using a high platform that we lowered as we worked our way down from the ceiling.
Claudia’s intricate design also required the finished piece to be able to incorporate discrete but effective points of light that would shine out from the centre of the three clusters to pick out and illuminate the glass discs to create an overall enchanting glow. The glass discs also needed to be positioned in such a way that, without touching each other, they were able to hide as much of the support structure as possible in order to maintain the enigmatic nature of her design.
Following meetings with Claudia and the School’s structural engineers we conceived a way that would not only fulfill her design brief but would provide a safe, secure and long lasting support structure for her amazing chandelier.
The light shining through all the different pieces of Claudia’s glass on the chandelier looked so amazing when it was finally switched on.
Working to bring Claudia’s design to life with a minimal amount of visible supports for both the individual glass discs and the structure as a whole and provide a way of enabling the illumination of the discs from the centre, whilst still being strong enough to support the combined weight of the chandelier drew on our many years experience with our own suspended display systems, low-voltage lighting and working with our own rod display systems.
Our in-house design team used Auto Cad to plot the location and the angle of all the threaded screw holes prior them being drilled in the three brass spheres.
Our solution created a glass art chandelier that was over three meters in height and included three solid brass spheres 150mm in diameter that were each drilled with 22 screw threaded holes to take both the three 19mm diameter curved hollow suspension rods that connected the spheres together and the total of sixty 6.25mm diameter rods of different lengths that fixed Claudia’s glass discs to the spheres.
Our in-house design team used Auto Cad to create the technical specifications necessary for a total of 66 holes to be drilled and tapped in the three brass spheres using a 5-Axis machining centre.
Each of the metal spheres integral to the support structure of the chandelier needed to be drilled and tapped 22 times in order to take the 20 x 6.25mm Ø brass support rods for the glass discs and the two curved 19mm Ø hollow vertical support rods using 5-Axis machining.
During construction of the finished chandelier the power cables for the centrally located LED spotlights were fed through the hollow suspension rods and the lights themselves were then mounted at the base of some of the rods that hold Claudia’s beautiful glass discs to the spheres.
The different elements came together perfectly in the finished chandelier creating a wonderfully bold and majestic addition to the school’s interior.
If you would like more information about the glass art chandelier project shown here or if you have a future custom project that you think we might be able to help you with – please do call our Design Team on 01923 818282, email us on: sales@shopkit.com.
