Douglas Coupland may have dubbed it the “City of Glass”, with his so-titled best selling book in 2000, but it is Joel Berman who is single-handedly cutting, etching and moulding a stallar international image for excellence in this glistening West Coast city. Eric Enno Tamm reports from Vancouver for The Globe and Mail.

His strikingly textured and coloured architectural glass and sculptures adorn corporate headquarters, airport lounges and private residences worldwide. Gap, AT+T, Nortel Networks, Nokia, JP Morgan Chase Bank, Disney, Lufthansa, and Audi are among his many corporate clients. He has just finished a 3,150 square-metre mansion in Vale, Colorado, opened a new showroom in Chicago’s famed Merchandise Mart, and recently landed jobs in Turkey and Spain.

Berman, 51, has established a reputation for technical brilliance. He was one of the few glassmakers in North America who could reproduce the original pyramid-patterned glass for the delicate heritage restoration of the lobby in New York’s landmark Chrysler Building. General Motors then called him to re-glaze three buildings in Detroit designed by world-renowned architect Eero Saarinen. And he’s now restoring the glass in a 1930s bungalow designed by Modernist master Richard Neutra in Santa Monica.

Yet Berman isn’t vicariously living in the past via glass heritage work. Next week, he is jetting to New York to—hopefully—finalize his most spectacular commission yet, which could take his glass sculpture in fantastically futuristic directions, merging silica and cyberspace, art and information technology.

With a weighty voice, wire-rimmed glasses and the understated panache of Leonard Cohen (with a goatee), Berman comes across as a soft-spoken guru of glass. “We’ve invented a language of glass and glass expression in the way that we design and build,” he says, sitting in a glass-enclosed boardroom in his Granville Island studio. “It is all based out of a philosophy: We’re really trying to make the world a better place by making working environments better.”

The world is certainly a brighter place because of Joel Berman and his translucent balustrades, backlit undulating walls, etched glass collages and iridescent sculptures.

“He’s really ahead of the curve,” says Carol Jones, a Vancouver interior designer who has worked with Berman on more than two dozen projects over 20 years. “That’s why he’s done so well. He stays far ahead of the trends and even sets them.”

Berman has become a North American innovator, casting dramatic three-dimensional textures for flat architectural glass. He poured about $250,000 of R&D into two new designs: Arrigado is inspired by crumpled paper and Corrugated mimics all the corrugated steel cladding on Granville Island. Berman has also invented a technique to recycle tempered glass which won him a commission from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and holds the patent for a glass painting process that fuses paint to silica molecules.

Until he signs the contract, Berman is hush-hush about the identity of his prospective new client, a corporate media giant, in New York. Yet he can’t contain his enthusiasm about the monumental project and spills every other detail. He calls this magnum opus the “human drum” and is collaborating with two software developers and a multimedia artist who has worked on 14 Steven Spielberg movies. “It’s a real-time ambient data sculpture,” he gushes about the $4.5 million project. “There are screens built into the glass. It’s suspended. It moves. It’s lit. It’s a total entertainment feature as a sculpture for a lobby.”

Berman says that his glass creations are evolving from art and architecture into entertainment. He wants to tell stories in his designs, he says, and information technology and plasma-film laminated glass is allowing him to do that like never before.

Berman cut his teeth on glass in Winnipeg, where he grew up in the family’s jewellery business and first worked in leaded glass in the late 1970s. After a stint at the Pilchuk Glass School near Seattle, he set up a studio in Vancouver in 1980. He struggled during his early years, working from an old barn in suburban Richmond. Jones even remembers him selling glass earrings from his home.

His early work largely reflected a local clientele and climate. His glass textures with Italian names like Onda (wave), Spruzzo (spray) and Pietra (rock) drew inspiration from Vancouver’s natural setting, the mountains and water. He became known for graphical abstract landscapes, doing interiors for corporate clients like the Jimmy Pattison Group, BC Hydro and BC Gas, for whom he created the texture called Strata which resembles the pattern of sedimentary rocks where natural gas is found.

By the mid-90s Berman’s studio grew up and out of Vancouver. He got commissions for airport lounges in Toronto and Mogens Smed, a Calgary furniture manufacturer whom Berman describes as a mentor, convinced him to display his wares in 40 showrooms across North America. He grew bit by bit.

Then in 1999 he bought 10 computer-regulated kilns to cast massive 1.5 by 3 metre glass slabs for curtain walls, stairway treads, spans for bridges and railings. He also moved into a new 2,600 square metre factory in an industrial area of the Downtown Eastside which is fast becoming a “designers row” in the city. He now had the production capacity to take on the world.

“We grew like crazy,” Berman says, from 22 employees in 1998 to 60 today. He hired architects, designers and artisans from all over the world, bringing them to Vancouver from France, Japan, El Salvador, Mexico, China, Africa, Germany, and even a former teenage rock star and artist from Sarajevo who now paints glass in his factory.

“We are a living UN,” he says. To underscore the point, Berman mentions that they have, in fact, designed four sculptures for the United Nations too.

Despite his international renown, Berman has an astonishingly low profile in Vancouver. “Out of sight is out of mind,” he says. “We’ve been elsewhere.”

He spends about 10 days a month abroad, the United States and increasingly Europe, where he does 98 percent of his business. He recently completed two office interiors in Vancouver’s Bentall Centre, but really yearns for a major commission to showcase his foray into glass and entertainment. “I would love to do something in my hometown,” he says.

He plans to talk with Vancouver architect Bing Thom about his proposed “crystal” glass tower, which would be the city’s tallest building at 50 storeys. And tonight, Feb. 6, he is hosting an open house at his factory to hobnob with the city’s design and cultural cognoscenti.

“There are a lot of imitators,” say s Ian Dubienski, principal of Group 5 Design, about Berman’s designs being copied in Vancouver. “A lot of people are flying on his coattails and he needs to stay ahead of them.”

Naturally easygoing, Berman grows peeved only when he talks about these copycats, but then quickly catches himself before lobbing any nasty accusations. People who design glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones. And besides, he says: “As soon as you invent something, someone is going to copy it and you’ve got to keep moving on. We’ve really taken the approach that we’re going to keep moving. We are some of the trend developers in architectural glass and other people follow what we are doing.”

If he lands the New York commission, his “human drum” sculpture will certainly draw ohs and ahs from the design world. He is also launching a new line of whimsical products at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in May. Branded “Just For Fun” the line of glass furniture and tableware is a collaboration with Vancouver designer Judson Beaumont.

Berman casts so much glass now, about 100,000 square feet per year, that he needs to modernize his factory. He’s buying new “rapid-fire” kilns, a laser-guided drill, an automated cutting table and a $45,000 glorified dishwasher to clean large glass panels. He’s even computerizing his production with barcodes.

“It’s weird. We were an art studio and now we are going to have barcodes,” he says laughing, and then sighs, “It’s hard to be a rebel when you have barcodes.”