Glass bottles are an everyday presence that often goes unnoticed. They are everywhere, yet rarely become the focus of our attention. What we see instead is what they contain—wine, beer, soy sauce, vinegar, olive oil, and countless other products.
At the Recycled Glass Lab, we use deconstruction and reconfiguration to shift attention back to industrial glass itself. As discarded bottles are reheated, the interplay of form, structure, temperature, and time causes the glass to flow, collapse, and solidify in unexpected ways. Removed from their familiar functions, the bottles take on forms that feel at once recognizable and abstract.
Using recycled glass as a medium, the Recycled Glass Lab is an ongoing exploration of material transformation and new applications. Rather than framing the work around sustainability or environmental claims, we are interested in extending the beauty already present in the material and making its transformation visible.
Through the process of remelting glass, we explore time and temperature as forces that shape form. Their measurable values are objective, yet their effects are fluid and unpredictable, shifting glass from a standardized industrial product into something singular. In this process, familiar forms become abstract, and objective parameters meet subjective perception. What emerges is not simply a new function for discarded glass, but a different way of seeing the material itself.
