Temple Har Shalom

“This was my first big architecturally integrated window, so I studied quite a bit about the space and the relationship of natural light coming through the inside of the windows and outside. Then the temple members in Park City had to teach me what is important [for the artwork to reflect] about Judaism.” – Jun Kaneko

Commissioned by the Jewish community of Park City, Utah, Japanese-born artist Jun Kaneko designed 13 windows comprised of 713 square feet of fused glass for the main sanctuary of Park City’s first synagogue, Temple Har Shalom.

It was necessary that Kaneko’s design fit well with architect Alfred Jacoby’s building design while also meeting the desires of the community. Unaccustomed to working with glass at the scale needed, Kaneko reached out to Bullseye Studio for the fabrication of the project.

The panels are constructed by laying glass stringers (1mm threads of glass) onto ½” clear glass sheet panes. Panes of stringer were something Kaneko was constantly making, composing with, and photographing. Kaneko developed the entire design for the Bullseye Studio fabrication team to follow by clipping and arranging those photos into a final composition. He then provided a pane by pane set of designs, 468 total, showing the stringer placement.

Each of the stringer panes is unique, comprised of 340 stringers (159,120 stringers total), laid by hand according to Kaneko’s strict specifications. The panes were fused and arranged into panels making a central window measuring 30’ high x 25’ wide, and 12 side windows 13’ 5” high x 1’ 3” wide each.

“Very early I had an idea about using lot of color, but because people come together at the Temple with a purpose, color would be distracting. I picked blue and white as the major colors because those are spiritual and mysterious colors to me and it just happens to be the colors of the flag of Israel.” – Jun Kaneko

Bullseye Studio’s fortune in being selected by Kaneko for this synagogue project was an outgrowth of our work together on several previous glass exhibitions held at Bullseye Projects (2001, 2002, 2007), as well as the many hours spent with him in our factory and fabrication studio where innovations are driven to a large extent by in-house projects involving visiting artists. For example, Kaneko’s explorations suggested improvements in a new, large-format sheet glass line and initiated the production of our larger, non-lead 1401 Crystal Clear sheet glasses.