The first Plate Glass Vase (PPGV) was designed in 1979 and created during Sidney’s graduate studies at Mass Art.  It was born from two significant events that later proved fundamental to his career.  The first was that the hot shop got Too Hot!  It burned down.  The Plate Glass Vase was his unique reinterpretation of a vessel using the planar qualities of sheet glass and satisfied his frustrated desire to blow glass.  The second significant influence was his wish to make glass sculpture more accessible (both in size and recognition).  Until that point, his work was large scale and more conceptually driven.