Robert La Prelle, courtesy of Kimbell Art Museum The Kimbell Art Museum, with Henry Moore’s “Figure in a Shelter,” right of center.
Silverman visited the two museums when he was nearby in Dallas to see “Boolean Valley,” an installation that he had created with the architect Nader Tehrani, at the Nasher Sculpture Center (another Piano design). He wrote to Malcolm Warner, the Kimbell’s deputy director, and explained that he wanted to “get into the hole [the excavation for the Kimbell addition] scarpe nike, extract some raw materials to make some artifacts that memorialize this moment in time, when Louis Kahn and Renzo Piano come face to face in dialogue. The presence of Ando in the background as a concerned spectator is also of great interest to me.” Silverman wasn’t sure what kind of clay he would find at the site or what the resulting pots would look like, but hoped that they might suggest that they came from this important place.
The Los Angeles potter Adam Silverman always dreams big, far beyond the scale of the distinctive pieces he makes for Heath Ceramics (where he is studio director of Heath Los Angeles) and for his own Atwater Pottery label. For most of the last year his latest dream has taken him to Fort Worth, where construction is underway on Renzo Piano’s addition to Louis Kahn’s iconic Kimbell Art Museum. Silverman, who studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, was intrigued by the convergence of Piano and Kahn, two of his favorite architects. Add to the mix Tadao Ando’s new Fort Worth Modern museum next door to the Kimbell, and you have a triumvirate of design giants.
In all, Silverman harvested close to 8,000 pounds of clay from various stages of the excavation process and he has been working with each of the five types to find out how they will perform when wheel-thrown, slip-cast or hand-built. So far, the clay that Silverman has enjoyed working with most is the deep-reddish clay that he harvested from tree roots at the very beginning of his project and from the very bottom of the excavation pit. He’s thrown a number of pots and has also started forming bricks, which brings him full circle to Louis Kahn, who believed fervently in honoring the nature of building materials and famously told his students to listen to those materials: “You say to brick, ‘What do you want, brick?’” Silverman is listening to the clay as he continues to explore ways to work with it. He still hasn’t decided what to do with the acorns. For more on Silverman’s reverse archaeology, visit his Kimbell Project blog.
Adam SilvermanSeveral of Adam Silverman’s Kimbell Clay Project test pots sit on a table in his studio alongside his Atwater Pottery pieces, with their distinctive shapes and glazes.
Both the Kimbell and Beck Construction, the contractor scarpe nike, embraced the project and gave Silverman an all-access pass to construction documents, geological reports and, most important, the construction site. Before the chaos of major construction set in, Silverman spent a lot of time “thinking, listening, feeling the building.” Over time, his materials list grew to include five distinct types of clay; oak scarpe nike, elm and cedar wood harvested from the site (he used the wood to heat his kiln, and the ash produced by each one reacts differently in glazes); water; rust; rocks; and acorns, which Silverman stockpiled in two rented storage lockers. (He also developed an intimate relationship with the Department of Homeland Security when he started flying back to Los Angeles with zip-lock bags full of clay.)
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