On March 20, The Corning Museum of Glass will open the doors of its new Contemporary Art + Design Wing, the largest space in the world devoted to the display and creation of contemporary art and design in glass by Thomas Phifer and Partners. The $64-million expansion, fully funded by Corning Incorporated, features a 100,000-square-foot addition, which includes a 26,000-square-foot gallery space and a 500-seat live glass demonstration facility. The new wing provides an unprecedented opportunity for visitors to see the breadth and depth of creativity by artists who have pushed the boundaries of glass as an artistic material during the past 25 years.
The new, 26,000-square-foot gallery building is devoted to contemporary art and design in glass from 1990 until the present. The building’s five galleries of varying sizes contain diverse works, which are thematically curated, and the display also extends into the porch—a space that wraps around the entirety of the galleries. Works on view include many never-before-seen pieces from the Museum’s permanent collection, including large-scale sculptures, installations, glass “paintings,” and vessels. Artists who are well-known for their work in glass are on display, such as Dale Chihuly, Roni Horn, Karen LaMonte, Josiah McElheny, Beth Lipman, Liza Lou, and Klaus Moje, as are artists less known for their work in glass like Robert Rauschenberg, Tony Cragg, and Kiki Smith. A gallery entirely devoted to design in glass from the past 25 years features works by internationally recognized artists and designers James Carpenter, Christophe Côme, Dan Dailey, Studio Job, Tejo Remy, and Stephen Burks.
Description of the project by Thomas Phifer
What impressed me most on my first visit to The Corning Museum of Glass was how vital the institution is. Its innovative programs and collection of glass are truly inspirational, its reach remarkable. It was clear to me that the focus of our work over the next three and a half years would be to create the best setting for their extensive collection of contemporary glass while honoring Corning’s important ethos of innovation. We began this journey by trying to fundamentally understand glass as a material.
Corning invited us to design an expansion which would include new spaces for their contemporary glass collection as well as a theater, located in the former Steuben Glass factory. It became immediately clear that our new addition must forge a deep connection with the existing museum buildings and serve as a central and clarifying structure on the Corning campus. In 1951, Wallace Harrison designed the original campus with deceptively simple modernist rectangles clad in precisely detailed glass and steel. These still form the backbone of their campus. The new gallery building had to speak to this context and the contemporary works it contained. In contrast, the Steuben factory had to be restored to honor the activity of crafting with hot glass.
We conceived the new Contemporary Art + Design Wing as a “building on the green” – a structure that operates both as an organizing element and is also emblematic of its contemporary contents. We worked closely with the director and curators on an architecture that aligns with the spirit of contemporary glass. The works in their contemporary collection are increasing in scale and ambition – like Constellation by Kiki Smith or Liza Lou’s Continuous Mile.
For me, light is integral to everything we experience. Light marks the passage of time and connects us with nature. It is the poetry in our lives. I saw this in my first hot glass demonstration and again when we were introduced to the research and development process of the Museum’s major benefactor, Corning Incorporated. We became passionately invested as we discovered how much precision and innovation are involved with glass. We found ourselves literally being enlightened and empowered through innovation.
There was a transformative moment when we took a tall Alvar Aalto vase outside and looked at it in natural light. With the crisp fall light coming from the sky the vase held an amazingly clear, bright, and intense light. It embodied the light and simply glowed as it pushed the light back towards us. I so admire the rigor that glass artists bring to their works, from attention to temperature and gravity to the quality of the surface and moments of illumination. We wanted to bring this same focus to the architecture to create an extremely quiet building, which would operate in harmony with the glass works.
Text.- Thomas Phifer.
