Six years in the making, the newly expanded Corning Museum of Glass offers a glimpse into the future where commercial, cultural and community interests fuse into a new kind of public institution

Located midway between New York City and Niagara Falls is one of the state's most popular tourist destinations the Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG). Created in 1951 to mark Corning Glass Works' (now Corning Inc.) 100th anniversary, the museum now a not-for-profit educational institution has become the repository of one of the world's most comprehensive and finest collections of glass.

Currently CMoG is putting the finishing touches on a six-year, $62 million renovation that has transformed a 68,000-square-foot amalgam of period structures built in 1951 and 1981 into a contemporary light-filled 117,400 square foot facility. In addition to designing two new buildings for CMoG, architects Smith-Miller+Hawkinson managed to blend disparate old and new architectural styles while highlighting the most interesting aspects of each.

But it wasn't just the buildings that were updated and expanded. The renovation called for a complete rethinking of CMoG's artifacts and exhibits, and the addition of a new Glass Innovation Center, devoted to scientific advances in glassmaking. Ambitious in content and scope, the Innovation Center is unlike anything done before. Rob Cassetti, CMoG's director of education and creative services, observes, "This project is an experiment. It looks ahead five or ten years and guesses, 'This is where museums may be going.' "

To oversee exhibit design, CMoG picked Ralph Appelbaum Associates (RAA), one of the world's foremost museum designers. But Cassetti admits that Corning "did a couple of rounds with other exhibit designers" before settling on RAA. "We tended to find that our level of enthusiasm for the subject usually outpaced the designer's. If interest started to fade out in the beginning, it was a warning sign that it wouldn't be there at the end."

Corning, which had assembled a cross-disciplinary team that included everyone from poets to artists in its effort to bring depth and richness to the museum content, wanted to make sure that the exhibit designer shared this goal. "When we went to Appelbaum's office, they were working on the American Museum of Natural History and had a paleontologist on the staff. They were working on a Motown exhibit and had a cultural historian on the team. That sold us right away," says Cassetti. "We believed they would make the content part of the design process, not just decoration."

Cassetti attributes the success of the building to the early involvement of RAA with its architects and structural engineers. "There was what might be seen as a healthy tension among them. As the client, I saw a good collaboration."

Part of that may be because RAA considered the design challenge from the perspective of how a museum visitor would respond to the space, not just the exhibits but also the transparency of the building itself.

"Having come to exhibit design from architecture, I am always surprised at how black-box museum galleries are institutionalized," contends Jack Pascarosa, RAA's lead designer on the museum. "There's almost an assumption that all of the exhibits will be housed in a darkened void. RAA has been questioning the neutrality and separation of the gallery spaces for some time. In this project, explorations of glass run through the entire museum, in exhibits and architecture alike. No matter which part of the experience you're passing through, there's always a reinforcement of the properties of glass. What's interesting is the flow of that exploration. You never get the feeling that you're shut up in a container."

Indeed, visitors to the museum can't help but develop a greater appreciation for the physical properties of glass. Even the new entrance features a glass curtain wall where visitors walk through "fractures" in the glass skin. Inside, they cross over a glass rampway and are invited to watch a video program inside a "glass bottle" theater. The idea is to get visitors to look at glass rather than merely through it.

At the same time, designers were careful not to overwork this concept. Cassetti stresses, "The other side of the coin is that glass doesn't solve every problem. You can get carried away with the novelty of the thing. We used glass in ways that made sense. As an example, we used it as a flooring material when we wanted to talk about the strengthening of glass. It's not a throwaway gimmick. It is part of the interpretation."

Striking a balance between education and entertainment was critical in the Innovation Center. An overriding goal was to help visitors appreciate the wonders of glass and realize what it could contribute to the future. "To achieve that, we take people on a path that goes from the familiar to the unfamiliar," Cassetti explains. "We show the link between a window pane and the screen of your laptop computer, between a magnifying glass and an optical fiber cable, between the casserole in your kitchen and the nose cone of a missile."

Some 30 exhibits explaining that evolution are organized in three galleries: "Windows" looks at glass as a building material; "Optics" addresses its light conducting properties; and "Vessels" investigates its possibilities as a container. RAA conceived the galleries as open exhibition spaces that appear to "float" above the retail shops on the level below. "Ralph believes that commerce motivates invention," says Cassetti. "He was intrigued with the idea of the activity of the museum shops providing a context (and soundtrack) for the invention stories told in the Innovation galleries above." This connection may elude many visitors, but it reflects the range of thinking that went into the design.

Even though CMoG's permanent collection of objects includes 30,000 pieces spanning 3,500 years, it lacked a number of important industrial artifacts. The design team felt that the design direction had to be dictated not so much by what the museum already owned as by what it hoped to become. "Appelbaum facilitated the refinement of the exhibit content and identification of the significant 'wow!' artifacts that would make the exhibits come to life," says Cassetti..

CMoG's not-for-profit educational status helped to gain outside cooperation in that effort, Cassetti admits. "That broke the logjam in terms of where Appelbaum was taking us. Now we could talk to the Smithsonian, NASA, the people who put together the Hubble telescope. We began to amass this amazing collection of industrial artifacts that the museum had never had before."

At times, however, that meant the design had to move forward without confirmation that the museum could actually acquire the artifact. "Most of the stuff we were hunting for were things where we needed a whole case dedicated to it or the effect of the exhibit was hanging on getting that artifact," Cassetti says. One was a 14'x18' piece of glass, the largest that can be shipped on the highway. "Appelbaum's design called for hanging it from the ceiling. It was the eleventh hour before we could pull it off. We broke a couple before we could get a good one."

Another important piece was the twin of the Hubble telescope. "The case was designed, the mount was in, but we had no clue if we could get the thing or not," Cassetti recalls. In the end, Cassetti says they took the exhibit design to the supplier to make their appeal. "You know, we kind of said, here's the 'garage' where we're going to park your 'car.' It would look funny without the car in it."

On more than one occasion, the museum went to the Steuben factory next door to enlist the help of glass artists who were familiar with dealing with bizarre glass technical challenges, says Cassetti, who himself was a glass designer at Steuben before joining CMoG's staff. One problem the artists helped to solve was how to hang a 200-inch Pyrex^® mirror blank, which represented Corning's first and flawed attempt at casting a telescope mirror in 1934..

On display at CMoG since 1952, the disc essentially 20 tons of fractured glass needed to be remounted and moved, a problem that confounded engineers. Steuben designer, Peter Drobny, and his colleagues applied their expertise to the task. Today, a concrete base situated in the retail shop supports the sling-shaped mount for the disc, which rises up through the floor of the Optics gallery above. Though this solution was devised for practical reasons, it also addresses Appelbaum's idea of having different elements of the museum inform one another, Cassetti adds.

Cassetti cites this as just one example of the "times when we went to engineers and scientists who told us it couldn't be done, so we said we'll do it ourselves. In the end, we created our own mini R&D staff to invent these things that the design called for.".

Tenacity and creative problem solving have been essential during the long process, Cassetti emphasizes. "It's one thing to propose ambitious things early on, but you need a strong and committed team when you're trying to execute it."

Cassetti adds that the one thing he learned over the past six years is that "ultimately, you must take the risk. If you're not willing to live on that edge of risk, the design can't go as far. And it must be a collaboration between client and designer. You both give each other permission to take that next step further out toward the edge."

One problem solved by the design team was mundane, however vexing. It involved the public's desire to see a live glassblowing demonstration. From the museum's beginning, people stopped in at the Steuben factory next door to watch real glassmakers at their jobs. "When they saw it, they loved it," says Cassetti. "Trouble was, it's a real factory so when the workers went to lunch or took a break, there was nothing to see, and people went away extremely disappointed." The new Hot Glass Show remedies that situation. By building a theater-style setting in front of the factory, people can watch a glassblowing demonstration, with close-up views shown on live video during every step of the process, including inside the 2300° reheating furnace which is equipped with the same kind of window glass used on the NASA Space Shuttle.

Currently the final phase of the renovation is underway in the art and history galleries housed in a building originally designed by Gunnar Birkerts in 1981. "The new design opens up the building interior, which was something of a dark maze," says Cassetti. "RAA realized that it was physically exhausting to move from dark spaces to bright back-lit cases, then to dark again. They evened out the light level, carefully darkening the perimeter and brightening the core. It has made an amazing difference.".

Today David Whitehouse, CMoG's executive director, claims with great pride, "I don't think there's another museum like this, with this marriage of art and history, science and technology."

Indeed, even though CMoG is off-the-beaten track in a town with a population that still numbers roughly 14,000, nearly a half million people visit the museum each year. This has proved gratifying to Corning Inc., which is still the principal benefactor for the not-for-profit institution.

The museum, which started out in 1951 with about 2,000 objects, has far exceeded initial expectations. Not only has it raised appreciation for the contributions of the entire glass industry, it has had a major impact on the economy and quality of life in Corning where the Fortune 300 company likes to call itself "the biggest company in the smallest town in America." In an era of shrinking museum endowments and rising operational costs, corporate benefactors like Corning may be the vanguard for a new hybrid-type of cultural institution, one that celebrates an industry as much as the arts.