Project Details
- Project Name
- Corning Museum of Glass Contemporary Art + Design Wing
- Client/Owner
- Corning Museum of Glass
- Project Types
- Cultural
- Project Scope
- Addition/Expansion
- Size
- 100,000 sq. feet
- Awards
- 2016 AIA New York Design Awards
- Shared by
- Madeleine D'Angelo
- Project Status
- Built
- Cost
- $64,000,000
This article appeared in the June 2020 issue of ARCHITECT.
As client-designer pairings go, the Corning Museum of Glass and Thomas Phifer and Partners are remarkably well-suited—the institution, which is devoted to preserving and displaying delicate works, is a perfect match for the architect’s sensitive, artful approach. The fruits of their collaboration are showcased in the museum’s newest wing in Corning, N.Y., which boasts an interior sturdy enough to accommodate a half-million visitors per year, yet as refined and elegant as the Lalique glassware on display.
The architects began by leaving behind the boxy contours of the building’s square-planned envelope—which fills out a museum complex with wings by Gunnar Birkerts and Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects—opting instead for gently curving white interior walls that seem at times to disappear. The sensation of unbounded space is accentuated by a lighting solution that puts the focus on the work: Raked ceiling beams, acting as louvered shades, direct filtered natural light onto free-standing display cases in the middle of the galleries. The sunbeams strike the colorful objects within, enhancing their vibrancy in such a way that they seem to float against the room’s white backdrop.
As airy and evocative as the exhibition spaces can be, Phifer’s scheme also includes pragmatic accommodations like new offices for museum employees, auxiliary rooms for public meetings, and a renovation of the museum’s existing glass-blowing demonstration space, with a lofted viewing theater where museumgoers can watch professional glazers at work. Translucent glazing allows visitors to gaze out at the surrounding museum campus and to the longtime headquarters of Corning Inc., which is still making the clear stuff after more than a century and a half.
The vase spent years holding flowers in the reception area of Thomas Phifer and Partners’ New York office before it had its moment in the sun. “We’ve had it for as long as I can remember,” recalls director Thomas Phifer, FAIA. “It’s the bigger one by Alvar Aalto, with the subtle curves. We were trying to learn about glass, so we took it downstairs onto the sidewalk, right onto Varick Street.”
The sidewalk experiment was prompted by the commission to add a 100,000-square-foot, $64 million wing for contemporary art and design to the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y., a company town where the eponymous glassmaker has been headquartered since 1868. The addition features a 26,000-square-foot, single-level gallery over lower-level offices and adjoins an industrial shed from the former Steuben Glass Factory that has been converted to a 500-seat glassblowing demonstration theater. The administrative campus is already a timeline of the architectural applications of glass, as is the museum building: the 1951 glass-block and curtainwall International Style original by Harrison & Abramovitz; Gunnar Birkerts’ 1976–1980 addition, all mirrored angles and tinted curves; and Smith-Miller + Hawkinson’s 2001 galleries and admissions lobby, a study in cable-stayed structures and fractured-seeming geometries.
Down on Varick Street, Phifer was especially interested in sunlight. “It was really bright that day,” he remembers, and once they took that vase outside, “this thing that we hadn’t ever totally paid attention to just came to life.”
Because, unlike most artwork, the glass objects in Corning’s collection would sparkle unharmed in sunlit display, and because they were to be shown primarily in the round rather than against walls, the conventions of museum enclosures could be rethought. “Usually you’re deflecting light to the walls,” Phifer says, “but here we wanted to push the light straight down. So we started looking at beams as a way to channel light to the floor.”
Working closely with structural engineers Guy Nordenson and Associates, Phifer topped the gallery volume with slender precast concrete beams, each 3½ inches wide and 4 feet tall, running north–south on 3½-foot centers below a pixelated array of variously transparent, translucent, and opaque roof panels. Here, Phifer’s signature big roof has transformed from a filter, as at his North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh (2010), to an amplifier. “Usually, in galleries, we’re trying to get to 30 footcandles of brightness, and as low as 10 for works on paper,” Phifer says. “Here we have a range of 400 to 500. The more the better.”
Below that orthogonal array of beams and skylights is a striking counterpoint: a sculptural enclosure of sinuously curved 20-foot-tall by 2-foot-wide cast-in-place concrete walls. The white-plastered gallery walls (which also handle air, with outlets along their tops and returns through doorway soffits), create a building-within-a-building of galleries for the permanent collection and rotating exhibitions.
“The shape of the vase never occurred to me here, at least consciously,” Phifer reflects, despite the seeming formal resemblance. “It was an intuition about these very soft rooms, about the softness of glass when it’s made, about walking into a cloud.”
The curves produce an edgeless cyclorama effect within each gallery, suspending displays of often brightly colored glass objects in lightness and whiteness. Where the doorjambs in the curving walls between galleries face sightlines from the primary entrance and perimeter circulation, they gradually taper to a near-knife-edge, further dematerializing the massive structure.
“I love Brice Marden’s work,” Phifer says. “I began to look at his paintings very closely—he takes these ribbons of color, he connects them and directs them. I love the interactions with the edge of the painting, that wonderful tension there.”
Entry from the existing lobby is positioned at just such a point of tension: the southeast corner of the new wing, where the addition’s rectangular plan slots into the existing structures along its southern edge, accommodating service spaces in a deep boundary between old and new. “The addition had to weave itself in there in a careful and seamless way, to get everything knitted together,” Phifer says.
“So you turn right from the lobby and go through a 20-foot-deep tapering portal. It’s an experiential thing. We wanted to protect the integrity of the existing spaces, so there’s this metaphorical gasket in between, this moment of pause.” That moment of pause addresses the widest of what Phifer calls the addition’s “porches,” or the perimeter circumambulation between the rectilinear exterior walls and the undulating gallery enclosure, which overlooks a newly landscaped garden and directs the eye to the entrance of the glassblowing theater beyond.
Just as the new wing’s curvaceous central structure is withheld from the perimeter, the seating and stage in the theater are set back some 6 feet within the historic structure’s existing walls, reinforcing the experience of suspension and lightness established in the galleries. Phifer retained the distinctive bunny-eared roof-ventilator profile of the existing building, recladding the entire structure in dark corrugated aluminum, creating a counterpoint in the landscape to the sleek and pale new wing—a sooty lump of coal next to a milky block of ice.
The seeming simplicity of the gallery block’s icy façades relies on considerable technical complexity. Because the deep interior walls “provide lateral stability like the core of an office tower,” Phifer says, the exterior walls can be lightweight—exceptionally so in a window wall of 1-inch-thick low-iron panes of laminated glass, each about 20 feet tall by 10 feet wide, which runs without mullions some 144 feet along the new wing’s north side.
“There’s a heroic scale to the panes and the smallest possible joints between them,” Phifer says. The addition’s 140 façade panels, prefabricated in Germany, serve equally as window and wall, differing only in the transition of their PVB laminar interlayer, from clear within the sections of vision glass to opaque for the rest of the wall structure—which is, as Phifer puts it, “as white as white is white.”
“That same glass goes from being rainscreen to being weatherproofing,” the architect adds, “so all the solutions happen behind the glass around the head, jamb, and sill of those windows, to create that moment of expanse without a frame. That detail is really the whole building right there.”
That gods, and devils, are to be found in such details is a truism attributed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the early modernist and proto-minimalist master of glass architecture. In Phifer’s recent work, such as his recently completed United States Courthouse in Salt Lake City, he establishes a new kind of minimalism—not of refusal and removal, but of strategic synthesis in which fewer forms perform greater functions. Here in Corning—in those concrete beams whose vanishing narrowness directs both loads and light, in those internal walls whose curving depth accommodates both structure and air-handling—less does more.
Although Phifer’s work, with its zest for components and arrays and alloys and polymers, visibly falls within a high-tech tradition, it resists the mannered hyperformalism into which many of the genre’s founders have now lapsed. The result at Corning is an intricate simplicity and an expansive restraint, serving neither a Puritan abstemiousness nor a polemical economy, but supporting a maximal sensory experience of literally visual and figuratively physical lightness. One in which the curated artifacts and landscapes provide the essential spectacles and illuminations. It’s a vase that makes you see the flowers.
Cost: $64 million
Project Description
This project won a 2020 AIA Interior Architecture Award.
FROM THE AIA:
Welcoming nearly 500,000 visitors annually, the Corning Museum of Glass is one of New York’s most popular museums. The museum surveys nearly 35 centuries of glass, from ancient to contemporary works, and since opening in 1951 has seen five major expansions. Each has included innovative glass architecture, and this new 100,000-square-foot Art + Design Wing is no exception.
The new wing adds 26,000 square feet of exhibition space and is the museum’s largest space dedicated to the display of contemporary glass art. In addition, it provides new offices for museum staff, a community room for community and school programming, a retail shop, and a renovated hot glass workshop for live demonstrations.
Its crystal white façade contrasts with Corning Incorporated’s original dark office building. A layer of laminated glass that seamlessly transitions from rain screen to translucent window provides views onto a campus green. At 150 feet long, the viewing area aligns precisely with the floor and ceiling. Within the rectangular building, curved concrete walls eschew museum norms of straight walls required for paintings and works on paper.
The project’s architectural heart is found in the fully daylit gallery, which showcases the museum’s large collection of contemporary works. The ambient lighting is completely natural, entering the space through insulated skylights above and fritted windows along its perimeter. When needed, high-efficiency LED and fluorescent lighting strictly controlled through external daylight sensors provide complementary lighting. In the museum’s generally overcast environment, this light-filled space is uplifting for both visitors and museum staff while illuminating and honoring the works of art.
Though the museum was already a popular cultural destination, the new wing has prompted an increase in visitors and summer program participants. By changing the gallery viewing experience, it has also injected the campus with a new sense of vitality.
Project Credits:
Project: Corning Museum of Glass
Architects: Thomas Phifer and Partners
Structural Engineer: Guy Nordenson and Associates
M/E/P and Fire Protection Engineer: Altieri Sebor Wieber
Landscape Architect - Reed Hilderbrand
Facade Consultant - Heintges
Daylighting and Lighting Design - Arup
Climate Engineer - Transsolar
Civil Engineer and LEED Consultant - O’Brien & Gere
Waterproofing Consultant - Simpson Gumpertz & Heger
Environmental Graphics - 2x4
Cost Consultant - Stuart-Lynn Company
Spec Writer - Construction Specifications
Acoustics and Audio Video Design - Jaffe Holden
Theater Design - Theatre Projects
Construction Management - Gilbane+Welliver Joint Venture
