With the opening of the Pearl Avenue Branch Library in San Jose, Calif., the city has became the first municipality in the United States to install permanent public art that combines art glass and photovoltaic (PV) cells in an architectural application.Artist Lynn Goodpasture’s public art piece titled Solar Illumination I: Evolution of Language, commissioned through the San Jose Public Art Program, integrates green technology and art. The artist collaborated with Peters Glass Studios in Portland, Ore., in the creation of an artwork that incorporates glass-embedded PV cell technology that in turn powers a suspended glass LED-illuminated lamp.

The artwork includes four art glass windows in the building’s southwest corner that convert sunlight to 24-Vdc electricity. For this project, art glass fabricator Peters Glass Studios translated the artist’s design directly onto float glass by airbrushing a combination of transparent, translucent and opaque vitreous enamels in multiple layers. The PV glass was developed by laminating PV cells within two layers of tempered float glass. The art glass and the laminated PV glass were then combined into an insulating glass unit for installation on-site.

The artwork’s imagery explores the evolution of alphabets as the foundation of the written word. Each window contains characters in scripts that are the basis for written Latin, Russian, Vietnamese and numerous Indian languages. “We are all one” is engraved repeatedly on the lamp in cuneiform. Goodpasture explains that Solar Illumination I: Evolution of Language links the past with the future by exploring the first writings of humankind, at the same time the art incorporates the newest applications of solar and LED technologies.