I remember visiting the Toledo Museum of Art years ago and seeing the glass collection, which was impressive even then, but today the Glass Pavilion at the museum is an especially worthy showcase for the legendary glass collection.
Museum founder and scion of the Libbey Glass Company family, Edward Drummond Libbey, started the collection to represent the entire history of glass. It includes more than 5,000 pieces, and it's one of the most comprehensive glass collections in the country, if not the world.
Treasures like a small blue pendant of Ishtar, made in western Asia about 3,500 years ago, and a cut-glass bowl that was one of the focal points of the Libbey Glass display at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis were among the pieces that Libbey donated to the museum in the early 1900s.
Little did Libbey know that his collection would grow and evolve to serve as the impetus for a new appreciation for glass as art and inspiration for a post-modern building to showcase the art of glass working and, as Libbey intended, to showcase the history of glass itself.
In 1962, the Toledo Museum of Art asked ceramics instructor Harvey Littleton to establish experimental workshops for glass working. Littleton, an instructor at the University of Wisconsin, had explored glass as a sculptural medium since the late 1940s and started the project with small hand-built furnaces.
The workshops were the beginning of the Studio Art Glass Movement and the presence of Toledo's glass industry meant ready access to expertise that helped move the development of the workshops forward. The TMA become the first museum to have a specially designed studio for teaching glass working techniques in 1969.
In 2004, the TMA began construction of a 74,000-square-foot Glass Pavilion that would be a state-of-the-art center to house, study and display the glass collection, serve as home to the art glass studio, and serve as a multifunctional space for classes, meetings and special events.
Tokyo architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa led the design and construction team that created the building, which opened to the public in 2006 and cost nearly $30 million to complete.
The Glass Pavilion exemplifies the Modernist use of architectural glass to connect interior and exterior environments into one unified whole.
You can easily see how the interior of the building flows into the exterior space and vice versa with a quick glance into the Glass Salon on a quiet weekday. The lack of sharp corners in the building enhances the feeling of a smooth flow throughout the building.
Each of the more than 360 glass panels that make up the exterior walls weigh 1,300 to 1,500 pounds and each section consists of two 3/8" panels laminated together. The laminate acts as a UV filter, although there is also an opaque glass gallery to display pieces that are particularly sensitive to light.
A space between the outer and inner walls of glass around the building's perimeter has the practical purpose of providing a buffer zone between the walls to improve heating, air conditioning and humidity control, but it also provides a little extra display room.
Visitors can watch artisans at work in the hot shop where furnaces maintain a temperature of 2150 degrees Fahrenheit (the temperature at which glass melts). We braved going inside the shop, but visitors can keep cool by watching the action through glass walls from a central corridor.
One of the showiest pieces at the Glass Pavilion is the Campiello del Remer #2 Chandelier in the Monroe Street Lobby, which Midwest art fans will immediately recognize it as the work of Dale Chihuly. It is part of a piece Chihuly created in 1995 with the Waterford Crystal factory in Ireland as an installation for a Venice glass show. After the Venice show, Chihuly disassembled the piece and reassembled it into two new works. One of the new pieces went to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Kansas City, Missouri. The second piece became the 1,300-pound chandelier assembled from 243 components and specifically designed for the Glass Pavilion.
Want to learn more about the Glass Pavilion? Check out Glass in Glass: Toledo Museum of Art by Paula Reich and Richiard H. Putney (which I consulted while writing this article) or The Art of Glass: The Toledo Museum of Art by Stefano Carboni, Martha Drexler, Sidney Goldstein, Sandra Knudsen and Jutta Page.
Thanks to the Thanks to Xanterra Parks and Resorts, Maumee Bay State Park Lodge and Destination Toledo CVB, which provided lodging, meals and a tour of Toledo-area activities for my review during a recent visit to Maumee Bay, with no further compensation. I was free to express my own opinions about my stay and experiences, and the opinions expressed here are mine.
© Dominique King 2012 All rights reserved
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