Glass wizard plans melting barrier in Jerusalem

Peggy Andersen

Monday, Sept. 20, 1999 | 8:41 a.m.

SEATTLE -- An artist who creates fantastically colored works of glass and plastic is sending 64 tons of ice blocks from an Alaskan well to Jerusalem, where they will be stacked into a 60-foot-long wall just outside the Old City.

Dale Chihuly's vision is that tensions in the Middle East someday will melt like his ice wall in the desert sun.

The wall, of course, will come down much faster than barriers between Jews and Arabs in Israel -- Chihuly's creation should take about a week to melt after it is installed on Oct. 3.

But Chihuly believes the message will be clear.

"I'd like to think it will make people feel good. Jerusalem is still pretty divided, east and west," Chihuly said recently in his studio in Seattle. "This happens to be right on the border. It could bring together Jews, Muslims and Christians from different parts of the city."

Chihuly still hasn't decided on the form the 20-foot-tall wall will take. Some portions probably will be collapsed, and the big blocks will be fused together using dry ice. The wall will be lit by 4,500-watt airport landing lights at night.

"Everything changes -- color, form," as the ice melts, he said. The wall initially will be transparent, but over time "the sun will make it more textured, more milky."

Chihuly, 57, whose own glass-blowing days ended in 1976 when he lost an eye in a car accident, oversees a Renaissance-style studio operation in Seattle, where dozens of glass artists execute his visions.

Unmistakable with his electric ragdoll hair and black eye patch, he spins his dreams of light and color in a rambling Lake Union boathouse crammed with workers, friends, and family.

Chihuly, whose works also have dangled over the canals of Venice, lived in an Israeli kibbutz in 1962 and "always liked the idea of ice in the desert."

So for his latest work, he decided on Jerusalem, where a yearlong exhibit of his work at the Tower of David Museum -- featuring thousands of pieces of colored and shaped glass -- has drawn 200,000 visitors since July.

The exhibit includes the Blue Tower, a fanciful 46-foot pillar made of hundreds of undulating kelp-like pieces, delicate chandeliers, iridescent and brightly colored spheres and oblongs, and forests of glass spears.

In an e-mail to Chihuly's studio, Israeli singer Noa Asher said that since "the Glass Magician ... set foot in the holy land, people have been obsessed with color and beauty rather than hatred and war. Now that's an achievement."

For the wall, Chihuly took ice from a well in an Alaskan quarry in August.

The blocks were loaded into refrigerated trucks and then hauled by rail to Anchorage, Alaska, barged to Tacoma, Wash., taken by train to New Jersey and then put aboard a ship that arrived Friday at the Israeli port of Ashdod. From there it will be trucked to Jerusalem.