Chihuly's Bridge To Art -- Big Projects Are Taking Tacoma's Dale Chihuly Into A World Beyond Galleries

If, sometime in the latter half of 1998, you drive to downtown Tacoma from Interstate 5, you will find it impossible to miss a 600-foot-long steel, copper and glass pedestrian bridge spanning six lanes of freeway spur and some railroad tracks like a Victorian boardwalk to the beach.

With five glass-walled, copper-domed, 35-foot-tall towers perched like giant pagodas in the sky over Interstate 705, each one showcasing a monumentally sized glass installation by Dale Chihuly - one of Tacoma's most famous native sons - the bridge will be eye-catching by day, and a glittering phantasmagoria of light and glass at night.

The influential Tacoma businessmen cheerleading and fund raising for the project hope the Chihuly Bridge of Glass, as it is being called, will be a popular visual icon for Tacoma - a one-of-a-kind, image-shaping, aesthetically risky structure that says Tacoma in the same way that the quirky but beloved Space Needle is visual shorthand for Seattle.

It also will be one of the more public monuments to Chihuly himself.

Though his seductive glass art is on view in many museums and publicly accessible buildings throughout the Northwest (and, increasingly, around the rest of the nation and in Asia), the bridge, as well as the proposed museum of glass art that is planned to connect with it, is the type of big, sweeping project that commands Chihuly's attention these days.

Along with helping to design the bridge and museum, he's halfway through his ambitious, year-long "Chihuly Over Venice" project - an installation that involves suspending huge glass chandeliers over a canal in Venice. Other Chihuly projects under way include turning some of the world's most magnificent 19th-century greenhouses into temporary exhibition galleries for his glass art, and overseeing installation of his glass at major museums and commercial buildings around the U.S. and in Asia.

A permanent exhibition of his colorful "Persian" sculptures was installed at the Singapore Art Museum in mid-November. And in October, after spending three weeks in Ireland temporarily installing glass "chandeliers" in an 18th-century castle, he flew directly to San Jose, Calif., for an opening of his work at the San Jose Museum of Art. With so many projects to juggle, Chihuly is often on the road.

Still, he likes to be directly involved. In Tacoma, not only will Chihuly choose and install the glass art in each of the bridge's towers, but he is helping design both the bridge and the International Museum of Modern Glass.

The museum will have a large permanent collection and exhibition of Chihuly's work, and also will exhibit work by other international glass artists. It is expected to be completed in late 1999. Groundbreaking for the museum will likely be late 1997; groundbreaking for the bridge will be late next year.

Given the track of Chihuly's career, collaborating on architectural projects is not so surprising a move. He gives talks to architecture groups to let them know he'd like to work with them. His museum exhibits and hotel and corporate installations are getting ever more complicated and extravagant.

Smaller glass works, such as his popular coffee-table sized arrangements of "baskets" and "seaforms," are lovely but break no new ground from a creative point of view. And they no longer require much of his attention, even though his hot shop on north Lake Union continues to pump them out for eager collectors. Such commissioned works help pay the bills for Chihuly Inc., the empire he runs. And though the various art galleries around the country that show his work probably shudder to hear it, he says "galleries don't really interest me that much."

What does interest him are big projects that are part installation, part conceptual art - such as "Chihuly Over Venice," which involves hanging perhaps half a dozen chandeliers made by his glass blowers and European collaborators over a Venetian canal late next summer.

In the kind of symbolic gesture Chihuly loves, some of those chandeliers might end up in the towers on Tacoma's Chihuly Bridge. From the picturesque gondola corridors of Venice to the bustling lanes of a Tacoma freeway; from the sublime to the workaday. Chihuly believes that glass art can be a universal language, and he is positioning himself as its translator.

Glasshouses also fascinate him. He seems to like the synergy of exhibiting contemporary glass sculpture - a 30-year-old art form still young and unconventional enough to be controversial in some staid art circles - in glasshouses, considered radical and unorthodox when they were first built in the 19th century.

In Ireland, where he took his entourage of glass blowers and installers in late September to collaborate with Waterford Crystal Co. craftsmen, Chihuly's team installed a 15-foot-deep "chandelier" made during the Waterford visit in a historic 19th-century glasshouse in Glasnevin, the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin.

Chihuly's team got permission to hang a chandelier and plant some 60 glass "spears" at either end of the central pavilion. The installation was up nearly two months and comes down next week.

His assistants also have had preliminary talks with officials at Golden Gate Park and the city of San Francisco about creating a similar installation in the magnificent conservatory there, though nothing has been decided. Such is his current interest in glasshouses that he describes the towers he is designing for the Chihuly Bridge as "a little bit Victorian. The bodies of the towers will be glass, kind of like greenhouses."

Like some other of Chihuly's projects, the point of the glasshouse installation in Dublin was to create a visual experience that intrigues him, and to photograph it. He seemed as interested in the results of the photographic and video documentation as in creating the work. He already has published an attractive portfolio of photographs from his collaboration earlier this year with a glass factory in Nuutajarvi, Finland.

Chihuly has been compared to Andy Warhol, and there are similarities. Warhol ran a New York studio/atelier that he called "The Factory" and staffed it with an army of assistants. Chihuly also is the chief executive officer and philosopher king of what might be called an art "factory," a studio that produces art based partly on Chihuly's artistic visions and partly on what the art market wants. Like Warhol, he has a flair for marketing and publicity for which he makes no apologies.

He is having "Chihuly Over Venice" filmed for a possible future documentary. And people who saw his September exhibit at Foster/White Gallery in Seattle still talk about the segment of the 12-minute video which showed him, apparently naked, in a bathtub while talking to the camera and his fiancee, who sat modestly wrapped in a towel on the side of the tub.

Then there is the recent publication of "Seaforms," a glossy book of color photographs of some of his "seaform" small glass sculptures. For $2,600 plus tax a buyer gets the book, the mini glass sculpture and a Plexiglas display case.

Depending on how you look at it, the petite sculpture, priced at a fraction of the cost of his larger work, is a way for middle-class art lovers to own a Chihuly. Or another example of Chihuly's talent for marketing.

Final plans and financing for the International Museum of Modern Glass are not yet in place. But the fact that it and the bridge are being championed by a who's who of Tacoma movers and shakers vastly improves the odds the projects will go through. George Russell, chief executive officer of the multinational, Tacoma-based Frank Russell Co., and his wife, Jane, chair the museum's board of trustees, which is also the fund-raising committee.

Other business and civic leaders on the committee are former governor Booth Gardner, News Tribune publisher Kelso Gillenwater, former University of Puget Sound president Phil Phibbs and Pilchuck Glass School co-founder Anne Gould Hauberg. Of the $24 million it will take to build the bridge and the museum, and the additional $7 million the committee wants for an endowment, all but about $4 million will come from private sources.

Though he lacks formal architecture training, Chihuly, a man who rarely hesitates to delve into any project that piques his interest, from book publishing to filmmaking, is collaborating with Arthur Andersson, the Austin, Texas, architect in charge of the overall design for the bridge and the museum.

Andersson, who with his partner, Charles Moore, designed the Washington State Historical Museum now being constructed next to Tacoma's Union Station, says he travels to the Northwest monthly to confer with Chihuly.

"He's got a great eye," said Andersson. "And a great sense of what he feels is right."

The 75,000-square-foot museum will include 30,000 square feet of display space and a hot shop. Because of the expense and time involved in starting up furnaces - they take days to get hot enough for glass blowing - hot shop furnaces at the museum would likely never be turned off. Andersson says the glow from the furnaces could be like a "24-hour burning beacon . . . It could be pretty poetic."

"Poetic" isn't a term that leaps to mind when most people think of Tacoma, which is still fighting its historic image of a city built around belching, waterfront lumber mills. But then "poetic" probably isn't a word that might have been applied to young Chihuly either when he was growing up in blue-collar Tacoma, the grandson of Czechoslovakian immigrants and the son of a labor organizer.

Now that he hobnobs in the art world, however, and has people such as the Russells raising money to spotlight an art form that he's done much to popularize, there is some poetic justice in Tacoma ending up with what could be a crowd-pleasing museum. People like colorful, beautiful glass art, and Chihuly is master of the dazzling glass extravaganza.

Chihuly sees the future glass museum as something of a coup for his hometown. Though he works and lives in Seattle, he has a place in his heart for Tacoma. His mother still lives there, after all, and he owns a pink pickup truck with "Visualize Tacoma" painted across it.

"A lot of people would rather see the museum in Seattle," Chihuly said. "But it just wasn't happening there."