Located in Chicago’s gritty and gray Kinzie Industrial Corridor, the first-floor studio of Solstice Art Source is awash with color. Pieces of glass in striking patterns—emerald and sky-blue argyle; swirls of white on a soft gold background—line the walls and tables. Amid the collection are 24 leaded glass windows from the former Chicago Theological Seminary building, which will reopen in 2014 as the new home of the economics department and the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. Solstice, owned by Emily Carlson, AB’88, is restoring the windows. Carlson and her team have started a painstaking process—stabilizing, repairing, recementing, releading, painting, and cleaning—with a scheduled completion date of December 24. The pieces will then be reinstalled in the building. “Not only are they going to go back,” says Carlson, who sees her task as an honor to the craftsmen who designed the windows in 1928, “but they will be back up to snuff.”  

A member of the Solstice team follows up her cementing work by cleaning the leaded glass.

 

From the building’s second-floor library, the windows feature an upper panel with a university crest and a lower panel emblazoned with a person’s name. Carlson stands in front of a panel with the University of Chicago emblem while her colleague attends to a Carleton College crest.

 

Carlson with the University of Chicago crest panel, which awaits restoration.