Stretching the Limits

Stephen Stefanou

“I've always believed that the more complex you make a piece, the more difficult it is to copy,” says Stephen Stefanou, president and design director of Dallas-based Design Solutions.

It’s hard to imagine anybody copying Stefanou’s sculptural artistry. Not only is it complex, it’s typically monumental in size.

A case in point is the 800 candy-like twisters Stefanou created for Crystals at CityCenter in Las Vegas. The 60-foot twisters, made from two-foot by eight-foot sections of Eastman Spectar™ copolyester sheet, twirl kinetically from the ceiling during the winter season.

“The CityCenter project ranks as one of our very, very complex projects,” Stefanou explains.

The material had to be formed perfectly so that the double helix matched up with each contiguous section. “Putting all these together, we had to come up with some very innovative molding techniques, which we'd never done before and some very innovative materials for coating it because we wanted it to be holographic—silver. Spectar™ had the strength after it was shaped and then drilled and hung so that it would meet the structural code for hanging overhead in a public space.”

Stefanou likes to work with Spectar™ because it allows him to stretch the limits of what can be done with a transparent material. “Things can be done with Spectar™ that cannot be done with glass,” he says.