Chihuly Garden and GlassGlass taller than trees, colour descends

Glass placed among the plants

Seattle Center, United States — Glass art exhibition garden.

First, take in that yellow column.

Outdoors, hard material is planted into the flower beds. Thin tubes rise in clumps from the soil, uneven in height, while the real tree's leaves still move beside them, but this clump never does; round a wall and a bright yellow bursts from a blue ground, colour and shape each going their own way. Up close you see how long a single tube can be.

Inside, the light becomes human-made. A whole warm sheet presses down from overhead as you pass beneath, colour landing on your shoulders and the floor; further in, a room drops the background to full black, leaving only the work's edge traced by sidelight. Looking up and looking down show two different densities.

21 May 2012

The exhibition opened on 21 May 2012 on the site of the closed Fun Forest amusement park. It shows Dale Chihuly's studio glass; the buildings were designed with architect Owen Richards and earned USGBC LEED Silver certification.

The whole is in three parts: the outdoor garden, the glass house, and several indoor galleries. Outdoors, glass tubes are planted with real trees; in the glass house, works hang beneath the curved roof; the indoor rooms hold the edges with dark backgrounds. The three sit close, and a walk through changes the light three times.

The suspended work in the glass house is 100 feet long, among his largest hanging sculptures. Walking beneath it, you look up at a whole sheet of colour and down to see your shadow tinted. The glass house reads wider than it is tall; only from one end looking to the middle does the work join into a line.

Leaves made of glass

Here glass is shaped like plants and set among real ones. Outdoors it borrows daylight — overcast and sunny differ widely in saturation; the wind moves only the nearby tree, the glass never does, and you need a moment to tell which layer is real.

Indoors it switches to installed lighting. With the background darkened, the bright line at the edge becomes the work's outline; half a circuit around and the light-and-dark on the curves shifts with your angle. The works sit close, and detail needs your eyes to move slowly — stepping back and leaning in show different things.

The three parts have no fixed order. Outdoors to the glass house to indoors is one route; reversed, ending back under daylight, the colour looks a shade lighter than when you entered.

The curved roof still shows from the street

From the street, the glass house's curved roof and the yellow glass tower sit before the trees, a small sign at the base naming the garden. The building is not tall but runs long, a different scale from the tower beside it.

Up close, orange-yellow and blue crowd together and you cannot say which is the background. After a full loop you recall mostly that density, and could not quite say what any single work looked like.

The gallery arrangement changes; do not take a photo of that red-column group as something always present. Back on the street, the curved roof shows only its edge behind the trees — a different thing from the colour inside.