During this holiday season, something magical happened near Lake Geneva in southeastern Wisconsin. A crew constructed what it believes to be the world’s tallest tree made of glimmering glass.
The feat took place at Yerkes Observatory — home to the world’s largest refracting telescope. The art installation shines a light on the observatory’s past astronomical significance and its reimagined future.
A light drizzle didn’t stop people from gathering on a gray day in the village of Williams Bay, Wisconsin last weekend. They were drawn to the striking 31 foot glass coated green tree rising outside Yerkes Observatory — the star hadn’t yet been added.
"It doesn’t register as glass in their mind. People come up and they’re like ‘so when do you add the glass to it?," tree creator Jason Mack says. "When you walk up to it at night, when the lights are shining off it, some people think it’s saran wrap."
Mack and a four-person crew constructed the tree on weekends through mid December. First came the 3-foot steel frame, equipped with a motor and LED lights at its base.
Mack applies lava hot liquid as the steel frame rotated. "We’ve been adding about 200 to 300 pounds of glass to per day to the tree. And that glass is all donated by the community," he says.
Visitors brought the glass from their homes and businesses, tossing it in designated dumpsters.
"So it’s all green and clear bottle glass. And then we apply it to that 31-foot tall spinning steel armature. And we wrap the liquid glass around it," Mack says.
Mack says it’s like making a giant spool of glass. "So we gather up a big glob of glass, and then bring it to the tree and then we’ll just drip it. As the tree spins, it extrudes it off the end of the pipe," he says.
To coat the tree’s entire height, Mack levitates hydraulically thanks to a lift equipped with his portable furnace. He had about a minute to work with each hot glop of glass before it cools and hardens in place. The 40-year-old Champaign-Illinois-based artist has been working with glass since he took a beadmaking class with his mom when he was 17.
Years of experimentation followed.
Fifteen years ago, Mack crafted his first glass tree, which was a twelve footer. The idea to go really big — triple the size — and at this location came from Mack’s childhood friend who told him Yerkes story.
The University of Chicago shuttered the observatory in 2018. Then a group of locals stepped up. They formed a nonprofit not just to save the place but to reimagine it.
"You really stand in awe of what’s been accomplished here and what’s been done. So, I try to make sure I create something worthy of such an historic place," Mack says.
Back on the ground, as Mack invites visitors one at a time to take a turn at the tree, applying glass, Yerkes programs director Walt Chadick dazzles visitors inside the observatory. Yerkes, founded in 1897, is considered the birthplace of astrophysics. The shape of the Milky Way was discovered here. Newspapers printed photos captured here that ricocheted around the world, connecting humans to space.
There’s plenty of scientific namedropping on the tour. Not only did Albert Einstein visit Yerkes
"You’ll see in this room a hemisphere that Gerard Kuiper and Carl Sagan built in 1958. We found this in the attic when we moved in. We found Edwin Hubble’s doctoral dissertation in the early days," Chadick says.
He says the mission of the observatory, in the hands of a small staff enacting the vision of the people who saved it, is to inspire people to experience science and art in unexpected ways.
Chadick says Yerkes is already living up to that task.
"Tracy K. Smith, the poet laureate of the United States, read from her book Life on Mars about her dad working on the Hubble telescope … We had the Blackbird Creative Lab with 25 musicians from around the world, two weeks immersing in this wild, peculiar space making a symphony based on their experience in the observatory, including a piece composed by Philadelphia-based Ari Sussman," Chadick says.
"Just about the time you think this is 'high end,' you get a group of 11-year-olds coming in with the most amazing questions," Dianna Colman says.
Colman led the mission to breathe new life within and outside Yerkes’ walls. She can’t believe how quickly it’s taken flight. "I think the thing I’m proudest of is watching the faces of the people as they learn through this and it's just been wonderful," Colman says.
Outside Yerkes, Jason Mack has donned a hard hat. Rising above the crowd, he’s about to gently drop a 5-foot star-studded with 40 glass spikes. The crowd erupts, and then once more as the star glows a bright white light.
Over Mack’s weeks-long creative process, 12,000 people, likely drawn to the world’s tallest glass tree, witnessed it taking shape. Many experienced an additional sense of awe. One thousand walked inside Yerkes Observatory for the first time.
_
