Continuing Education: Corning Museum of Glass, New York
Reflections on the Box: A new addition at the Corning Museum of Glass by Thomas Phifer and Partners continues a tradition of invention at its upstate New York campus.
This month, a new addition opens. Though connected to the earlier constructions, it is as different from them as they were from each other. 'We wanted our building to be a quiet voice in that ensemble,' explains Thomas Phifer, architect of the new 100,000-square-foot Contemporary Art + Design Wing. Taking a reductivist approach, Phifer was inspired by the vitrines that typically house museum objects, which led to an extreme decision for a complex building type: his museum, like those display cases, would employ a single layer of glass to encase the 26,000-square-foot, one-story gallery and lower-level offices. (The new wing also links to a historic factory building renovated to contain a 500-seat facility for glassblowing demonstrations.)
The result is a pristine, frosty-white glass box with a visual simplicity that belies its underlying complexity. Thomas Phifer and Partners worked with structural engineers Guy Nordenson and Associates to create hefty but sinuous interior walls that take on much of the structural duty and house mechanical equipment, allowing the glass-clad exterior walls to be designed as a light steel frame. The 20-foot-tall cast-in-place curving concrete walls are topped by 3'-inch-wide and 4-foot-deep precast-concrete beams. Spaced 3 feet, 2' inches apart, the slender beams direct daylight from the skylight-covered roof to the floor, where the large contemporary glass works'which, unlike many types of art, are unharmed by sunlight'will sit.
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