A new project at the Michigan Capitol will replace about two-thirds of the glass panes that make up the building’s first floor in the rotunda.
Various repairs have been made to the floor over the years, including after a fire in the 1930s. But because each set of replacements came from a different firm, piece by piece the panes of glass stopped matching each other.
Robert Blackshaw, the Executive Director of the Michigan State Capitol Commission, says they always wanted to update the floors to match the original glass, but finding suppliers who could do that proved difficult.
But when he saw the work Lucid Glass Studio did in the Chicago Cultural Center, he “knew right away that these were the folks.”
While most glass today is cooled on sand beds, the Rhode Island-based firm created a graphite bed to match the process used in the 1870s for the rotunda glass replacements. This ensured the new panes would have the same chill marks.
“They helped us develop a piece of glass that mocks the original almost to the T,” Blackshaw said. “We’re talking about the light spectrum, the opaqueness of the finish on top, the colorization and the thickness matches on it.”
The restoration should also mark the return of the building’s signature optical illusion: when viewed from the upper floors, the glass floor is meant to look like an inverted dome.
As the glass has become more mismatched over the years, the illusion has become less noticeable.
“We think over the years that vision has lost itself because the different colors of glass that have been put in there, they haven’t matched exactly,” Blackshaw said. “I always use the reference, it’s a green, blue and white calico cat when you look down.”
Restoration work should return the effect to its former glory, Blackshaw said.
“Now that the glass will match and the light spectrum will be more pure, we think it will bring back the illusion better of an inverted dome or a bowl more than it ever has been in many, many years,” Blackshaw said.
The project is expected to be completed in five phases; workers will replace about a quarter of the floor every two months before spending another two months to replace the hexagon in the center. In total, they’ll replace about 680 of the 976 pieces of glass that make up the floor. The project will take about a year to complete.
The new floor is the latest in a series of improvements made to the building in recent years, which include the installation of a new heating and cooling system, the addition of a visitor center and, most recently, a cleaning and restoration of the interior dome’s decorative surfaces.
“This is one of the restoration projects I think is going to sit right up there with the aesthetic restoration of the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, that really made us a national historic landmark,” Blackshaw said.
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