Museum of Glass

It began in August, 1992 in the course of a conversation between two friends, Phil Phibbs, who had recently retired as president of the University of Puget Sound and artist Dale Chihuly who had grown up in a neighborhood near the campus and had attended the university. Dr. Phibbs suggested that Tacoma should have a glass museum. He reasoned that artists from the Pacific Northwest had played a major role in the Studio Glass movement as it developed around the world. In particular, Dale Chihuly had influenced the movement significantly, first through his personal artistry and then through the Pilchuck Glass School, which he had founded in the early 1970s with Anne and John Hauberg.  A few weeks later, Phil Phibbs outlined his idea and the rationale for a glass museum to the Executive Council for a Greater Tacoma, a group of business and governmental leaders. He fully expected to be politely dismissed. Instead, he was invited to stay for the next presentation. It was a plan for the redevelopment of the Thea Foss Waterway, which at the time was an empty industrial wasteland along a narrow channel of water so polluted that it qualified as a federal Superfund clean-up site. The Chairman of the Council, George Russell, concluded that the idea of a glass museum coincided quite beautifully with the need for a dynamic anchor tenant on the restored waterway.