Glass Masters: New Designs from LA's Pulp Studio

Retro, one of the new designs from Pulp Sutdio's BOING range of decorative architectural glass. Photo courtesy Pulp Studio.Sometimes it feels like we’re living in the future. Everywhere you look, industries are pushing the envelope—testing just how far a given material can be manipulated, changed or improved upon. Case in point: Pulp Studio, a pioneering Los Angeles–based company that has been developing and manufacturing specialty glass products for most of the last two decades.

Over the years, the firm’s research and experimentions has yielded an impressive list of new products, with two new releases, provocatively dubbed BOING and Fragmento, continuing the tradition. “BOING is a wonderful example of how we can take our laminated glass product to the next level,” says Pulp Studio CEO Bernard Lax. “Normally we use two layers of glass with a single interlayer (a sandwich) —but here we have used up to three or four (a club sandwich). The clear colors read through each other to create additional color mixes, and the thickness and see-into quality gives the product great depth.” The resulting designs are bold and graphic, with an amazing three-dimensional quality.

The company's new Fragmento design is composed of thousands of shards of glass. Image courtesy Pulp Studio.In contrast, says Lax, the design “Fragmento is a more organic form of taking multiple pieces of broken glass and fusing them to create a textural and abstract form. Normally this type of material would be more craft oriented and subject to only non-commercial application, but by using our other techniques we are able to produce the glass to comply with the required safety standards that are necessary for these commercial applications.”

Even better, they can be customized with virtually any pattern or color, allowing clients to let their imaginations run wild. Lax is quick to point as much. “Products are just ideas; our real expertise is helping the designer or architect understand what he/she can do with glass, which is a very technical material that only the most experienced manufacturers can truly understand. We don’t just sell a product, we collaborate with architects as glass engineers so that they can be assured that their project ideas have longevity.”