Museum of Glass

A centerpiece of Tacoma's downtown revival, the Museum of Glass appears to have sprouted right out of the bank along the Thea Foss Waterway. A gleaming steel cone, 90 feet tall, tilts at an improbable angle as its house-sized base emerges from within the building and tapers toward the sky. The huge cone is both the roof and the chimney vent of the museum's Hot Shop Amphitheater glass studio. The shop is the center of activity--a working studio complete with stadium seating from which visitors witness a continual schedule of glass-blowing demos. The museum's galleries host rotating exhibitions of contemporary glass art and related media from an international slate of artists. World-renowned glass sculptor Dale Chihuly is a Tacoma native, and his hand was behind the Bridge of Glass, an elevated pedestrian walkway connecting the glass museum to the nearby Washington State History Museum.