Summer Stage
Year 2001
Type Commercial
Size 7000 sq. ft.
Client Corning Museum of Glass
Budget $1.9 million construction cost
Project Team
Ingalill Wahlroos, Project Architect
Flavio Sigliano, Design Team
Engineering
Delta Engineers, Structural Engineering
Dewhurst Macfarlane and Partners, Glass Specialist Consultant
Photography
Robert Barker
The Summer Stage is an outdoor theater for glassblowing demonstrations and the summer home for a mobile glassblowing unit for the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. The challenge was to design an outdoor theater that linked, and made reference to adjacent buildings including the Corning Museum of Glass by Smith-Miller+Hawkinson (2001), the Glass Museum by Gunnar Birkerts (1981) and the Steuben Factory by Wallace Harrison (1951). The project was designed, fabricated and installed in a single year. The roof is comprised of two tilted glass planes: the larger one above the seating area illuminated with billboard up-lighting, and the second cantilevered from the adjacent original factory building. The stage consists of a custom-designed mobile glassblowing unit, also designed by us, that is typically docked at the west end of the platform but also folds up to travel for performances and as a mobile, hot-glass classroom to teach students about the wonders of glass art.
The seating area consists of two surfaces: a tilted glass roof plane and an aluminum seating platform below which cullet, recycled and broken glass used in the glass manufacturing process, provides a luminous, glittering effect below the walking surface. An entrance ramp with a cantilevered glass canopy leads to the seating area and inspires the pointed moniker for the project: ‘the glass ceiling’.
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