Have You Ever Seen a Stained Glass …Tower?
Even for those who love researching stained glass, this is something you don’t see very day. A stained glass tower!
It was created by a French artist named Gabriel Loire (1904-1996), who was famous for his immense panorama walls of glass using large chunky glass pieces (called slab glass) to create broad scenes, much the way the Cubist painters used blocks of paint to craft their images.
Loire’s style has been called Impressionism in stained glass, and his works are in churches and buildings on five continents. This creation, however, is one of a kind. It is literally a tower made of stained glass walls.
It sits by itself in a garden on the premises of the Hakone Open-Air Museum about 25 miles southwest of Tokyo.
Loire created this tower in 1975 and considered it a massive sculpture to which he gave the name, Symphonic Sculpture. As you’ll see in the pictures below, the colors and arrangement of pieces seem to give the impression of a coordinated “symphony” of light and beauty for the observer who enters and climbs its 59 feet to the top. The central spiral stairway leads to a platform that looks out on the museum grounds and surrounding mountains.
If you find it hard, and maybe a little scary, to imagine a tower made of glass, well, don’t worry – it won’t collapse. It’s ribbed by a strong steel frame, with glass pieces an inch thick firmly embedded into the framework with an industrial epoxy that can probably withstand a Pacific typhoon.
Admittedly, the rest of the open air museum is a little bizarre, with modernist sculptures of questionable artistic value spread throughout the 17 acres.
But I’d go to Japan just to climb this amazing sculpture of symphonic light.
Photo Credits: Tower by Suicasmo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Views by Tripadvisor and Pinterest.
