Museum on the rise: Tacoma building has art of glass ... and more

Tacoma is building a $63 million Museum of Glass, scheduled to open next summer, and with a name like that, you'd expect the first show to be, well — glass, right?

To that director Josi Callan has a prompt reply: "Don't forget the colon."

That colon precedes the rest of the museum's title: International Center for Contemporary Art.

And one of the museum's opening exhibits will have nothing at all to do with glass. Expect that kind of programming to continue.

At a walk-through of the site yesterday, Callan and architect Arthur Erickson unveiled a glimpse at a bold structure that will offer more than a place to display and create glass art. It's evolving as a wide-ranging institution that could offer strong competition to other regional museums, including the nearby Tacoma Art Museum.

It's a long way from the seven-year-old original concept as The Chihuly Center for Glass, Callan said.

"We don't use the words 'glass art' or 'glass artist' here," she insisted yesterday. "We feel that it marginalizes the artists." Although glass impresario Dale Chihuly was associated with the original idea, he plays no role in the museum now. "He's just a good buddy, a good friend," Callan insisted.

The 75,000-square-foot building, designed by Canadian architect Erickson, will house a glass studio, a theater, gift shop, café, and 13,000 square feet of gallery space. The museum, a few months away from completion, sits at the bank of the Thea Foss Waterway, at 1801 Dock St., just across from the Washington State History Museum. Already it makes a dramatic profile, with it's distinctive 90-foot cone towering over the site. This is the first museum that Erickson has built in the United States, but he is well-known for the soaring design of his Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

When the Museum of Glass is completed, a pedestrian bridge — The Chihuly Bridge of Glass — will bring visitors across the tangle of railroad tracks and freeway lanes that separate it from downtown.

That bridge created a challenge for architect Erickson. "The main problem of the building is that we were landing on the roof," the 77-year-old architect explained. Most visitors will arrive at the top of the museum, via the bridge. To accommodate them, he designed a graceful series of ramps that descend the side of the building. At each landing a reflecting pool echoes the waterway below.

Callan is thrilled with the sculptural exterior of the building, but has butted heads with designers over the building's function. When Wyn Bielaska, project architect from Erickson's firm, described the cone, which will hold the glass "hot shop," as "the signature of the building" and the gallery spaces as "kind of anonymous, almost like black boxes for the art," Callan bristled.

"Hey wait a minute," she said. "There's a lot of hot air being generated right now."

It's a common battle these days, with high-powered architecture competing with, rather than deferring to, the art inside.

"This building is a work of art," Callan maintains. "What's more important is what happens inside."

Judging from the opening exhibits, what's inside will be good. Using her contacts, Callan and new chief curator Neil Watson were able to snag a big show of work by Northwest favorites Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and John Cage organized by the Kunsthalle-Bremen, a museum in Germany. This will be the only U.S. venue for the exhibition. The other opening act will feature glass, paintings and drawings by Czech artists Jaroslava Brychtova and Stanslav Libensky, two of the world's top artists working in glass.