01 / 04Torus
Light, bent into form.
We hand-cast optical objects — pieces that do nothing but hold light, and change everything behind them.
Pellucid — light, bent into form. A Rotterdam studio for hand-cast optical objects.
Studio for optical objects
Rotterdam — est. 2019
02 / 04Sphere
Refract.
A sphere is the oldest lens there is. Ours are ground for a week so the world arrives upside-down and perfectly sharp.
03 / 04Cross
Disperse.
Push the angle and white light comes apart. Every edge is cut to split the spectrum on purpose.
04 / 04Glint
Resolve.
Then it all comes back together — one object, one point of focus. Keep scrolling to meet this season’s editions.
Scroll to bend light · drag to turn
Manifesto
We make things out of the one material you can’t hold. Glass is only the excuse — the real work is the light that passes through it, slows down, bends, splits into colour and lands somewhere new. Every object leaves the studio with a single job: make the room behind it worth looking at again.
01 — Objects
Five editions, cast this season.
Poured, annealed and polished in-house. Every image here is rendered in your browser from the same optics we cut to — nothing is a photograph.
05 editions · Autumn 2026
02 — The Bench
Tune the glass. Watch the world bend.
A simplified version of the optical bench we prototype every edition on. Change the form, the dispersion, the frost — then type anything and look at it through glass.
Live · WebGL
Torus
Drag to turn
θ 000°
03 — Process
Sand to signal in four stages.
-
01
Batch
Low-iron silica, potash and boron are weighed to the milligram. Any impurity becomes a colour you didn’t choose, so nothing enters the crucible unmeasured.
-
02
Melt
Eleven hours at 1,450 °C until the melt runs water-clear, then a slow stir to chase out every last seed of air.
-
03
Anneal
Four days of controlled cooling. Rush it and the glass remembers — as stress, as warp, as a crack a year from now.
-
04
Figure
Diamond-ground through seven grits, then pitch-polished until the surface is flat to an eighth of a wavelength of light.
04 — Specs
Measured, not described.
Every edition ships with this sheet and a birefringence map of the piece itself, signed by the person who polished it.
- Refractive index nd
- 1.517
- A ray entering at 45° leaves bent by 17.2°.
- Abbe number Vd
- 64.2
- Low dispersion — colour fringes only where we cut for them.
- Surface figure
- λ/8
- Flat to roughly 73 nanometres across the working face.
- Annealing
- 96h
- Stress-free to strain class 1, verified under polarised light.
- Transmission
- 92%
- Of visible light, through a 10 mm path.
05 — Enquire
Let light in.
Commissions for spring 2027 are open. Tell us about the room, the window, and the hour the light comes in.
studio@pellucid.studioStudio
Glasblazerskade 14
3011 Rotterdam, NL
Visits
By appointment
Thursday – Saturday
Local time
--:--:--
Elsewhere