Conical reflections: Erickson's Tacoma Museum of Glass celebrates manufacture and material qualities of one of humankind's greatest inventions.Arthur Erickson Arthur Charles Erickson CC (born June 14, 1924, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is an internationally celebrated Canadian architect. He studied Asian languages at the University of British Columbia, and later earned a degree in architecture from McGill University is a master of raised urban ground. His splendid piazza in Vancouver, which gently makes green public terraces in the middle of the city to greet the court building (AR July 1980) is surely one of the great triumphs of twentieth-century urban design. His Museum of Glass at Tacoma, further down the Pacific coast in Washington State, USA, is another essay in the same vein (though smaller). And it is a new Erickson venture into museum building, recalling his legendary Vancouver museum The Vancouver Museum is a local museum located in Vanier Park, Vancouver, British Columbia. It is housed within the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre building and is the largest civic museum in Canada. of the culture of indigenous peoples The term indigenous peoples has no universal, standard or fixed definition, but can be used about any ethnic group who inhabit the geographic region with which they have the earliest historical connection. . [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Unlike that building, the glass museum is downtown, locked into urban structure of railway and highway, seaside and centre. It ascends from the waterfront of the Foss Channel, one of Tacoma's harbours, as a series of planes, some of water, which are linked by ramps and a grand stair that winds round the dramatic signpost of the place, the skewed skewed curve of a usually unimodal distribution with one tail drawn out more than the other and the median will lie above or below the mean. skewed Epidemiology adjective Referring to an asymmetrical distribution of a population or of data shining cone of its big space covered by stainless-steel lizard-skin tiles. The cone is tilted as an abstracted memory of the structures of the sawmill sawmill, installation or facility in which cut logs are sawed into standard-sized boards and timbers. The saws used in such an installation are generally of three types: the circular saw, which consists of a disk with teeth around its edge; the band saw, which burners of the Pacific Northwest, but it also evokes the silhouette silhouette (sĭl'  ĕt`), outline image, especially a profile drawing solidly filled in or a cutout pasted against a lighter background. of Mt Rainier, the magic peak of this part of the
coast. Erickson says that the structure would have been clad in glass,
and so would much else of the mainly concrete building if 'devalue
engineering' had not been brought to bear on the project. In the
end, he decided that stainless steel stainless steel: see steel. stainless steel Any of a family of alloy steels usually containing 10–30% chromium. The presence of chromium, together with low carbon content, gives remarkable resistance to corrosion and heat. could shimmer nearly as piercingly as glass. Most people approach the museum across a bridge which spans railway and motorway. This rather kitsch kitsch [Ger.,=trash], term most frequently applied since the early 20th cent. to works considered pretentious and tasteless. Exploitative commercial objects such as Mona Lisa scarves and abominable plaster reproductions of sculptural masterpieces are described as route is by Andersson Wise working with a local artist who has created ingenious but obvious interpretations of Pacific marine life-forms in glass. The steel and concrete bridge connects the museum's serene upper level to the core of downtown Tacoma, and the history museum, University of Washington, and the future art museum. Other collaborations with artists have been more fruitful, notably the opposed repeating reflective glass planes posed over a long pool by Buster Simpson, and Howard Ben Tre's deliciously spurting spurt n. 1. A sudden forcible gush or jet. 2. A sudden short burst, as of energy, activity, or growth. v. spurt·ed, spurt·ing, spurts v.intr. 1. fountains. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [GRAPHIC OMITTED] [GRAPHIC OMITTED] [GRAPHIC OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Inside, the cone's tall and dramatic space is a hot theatrical inferno. Two furnaces melt glass, and there are five crucibles in which it is kept molten, and an equal number of annealers, in which the finished work is cooled down gently to prevent cracking. Height is needed to get rid of the heat; the furnaces blare and growl. Extremely able and witty glass artists perform in front of an audience of up to 140 people. It is all very different from the calm terraces and stairs which surround the cone, and from the galleries that are under them. These are rather low, neutral spaces but functional: appropriate in scale for the necessarily small objects that they are designed to exhibit, which are often excellently demonstrated by careful use of electric light. It is sad that Erickson, the master of voids and shafts of light, was not able to thoughtfully introduce more natural luminance The amount of brightness, measured in lumens, that is given off by a pixel or area on a screen. For example, dark red and bright red would have the same chrominance, but a different luminance. : glass and transparency are just as important in moderating daylight as the electric produced variety. Surely in a museum devoted to glass production, we should have some notion of the material's intermediary role between outside and in. The cone is the dramatic focus. It crashes down into the galleries, the cafeteria and foyer, still wearing its stainless-steel lizard lizard, a reptile of the order Squamata, which also includes the snake. Lizards form the suborder Sauria, and there are over 3,000 lizard species distributed throughout the world (except for the polar regions), with the greatest number found in warm climates. armour, making you always aware of the theatre it contains. It is often assumed that Erickson is a sketcher--not too involved with the making of his ideas. But at Tacoma, detailing is thoroughly thought out: clean, simple and well made, it is a very fine example of what can be achieved within the usually crushingly efficient but dull US building industry. E. M. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] |
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