Alaska Cruise-Seattle, Day 8

Arrive 7am sail 4pm

WELCOME TO THE SPHERES
People have an innate connection to nature, which is often lost in the urban environment. The Spheres were created to reconnect people to nature through biophilic design and provide a space to take in the positive effects of exposure to nature, like increasing creativity and reducing mental fatigue. Each plant inside The Spheres was chosen from the Amazon Plant Collection and is expertly cared for by members of Amazon Horticulture.

Chihuly Garden and Glass.

WINTER BRILLIANCE
Commissioned by Barneys New York in 2015 for its holiday window display on Madison Avenue, Winter Brilliance is a joyful expression of both its namesake season and Chihuly's desire to present his work in unexpected and dramatic ways. The composition comprises Chandeliers, Towers, Reeds and clusters of Icicles, a form which Chihuly developed in 1996 for his first permanent outdoor installation, the iconic Icicle Creek Chandelier in Leavenworth, Washington.
Ice is one of my favorite materials to work with because of the way it interacts with light. It inspired me to create the icicle form.
- Dale Chihuly

SEALIFE ROOM
The 15-foot Sealife Tower takes inspiration from the sea and Puget Sound. The Towers evolved from Chihuly's desire to present sculptures in spaces where ceiling structures could not withstand the weight of his Chandeliers.
The Tower and Vessels in this room include forms such as starfish, octopus conch shells, sea anemones, urchins, and manta rays. The Sealife Drawings, and Sealife Vessels are other ways in which Chihuly explores his love of the sea.

PERSIAN CEILING
Chihuly began the Persians series in 1986 while experimenting with new forms. Originally, he displayed Persians in pedestal compositions, often with smaller shapes nested in larger pieces.
Later, working with an architectural framework, he mounts larger forms to walls and suspends them as overhead compositions.
The first Persian Ceiling was presented in his 1992 exhibition opening the new downtown Seattle Art Museum. Lit from above and resting on a flat glass pane, the elements of the Persian Ceiling come together to provide an immersive experience in color and shape.

MILLE FIORI
With the Mille Fiori - Italian for "a thousand flowers" - Chihuly assembles gardens of glass that include many of his series of works.
First exhibited in 2003 at the Tacoma Art Museum, the techniques used to create the Fiori rely less on tools and more on the use of fire, gravity, and centrifugal force.
The artist has said that memories of his mother's garden serve as inspiration for these "gardens of glass."

IKEBANA AND FLOAT BOATS
This installation includes two of Chihuly's wooden rowboats, one filled with Ikebana elements and another with Nijima Floats. Their origins date to 1995 in Nuutajarvi, Finland, where he experimented with temporary installations along the shore of the nearby river and tossed glass forms into it to see how the glass would interact with water and light. Local teenagers gathered the drifting glass in rowboats, inspiring Chihuly to create a new type of installation with a variety of forms including two seen here: Ikebana and Niijima Floats.
The Ikebana Boat features long, flower-like glass stems inspired by the Japanese art of ikebana. Niijima Floats were inspired by the artist's trip to the Japanese island of Niijima and by childhood memories of discovering Japanese fishing net floats along the beaches of Puget Sound.

MACCHIA FOREST
Chihuly began the Macchia series in 1981 with the desire to use all 300 colors available to him in the hot shop and named it such atter asking his friend Italo Scanga the word for "spot" in Italian. Thinking about the colors and intensity of stained-glass windows, Chihuly realized that the glass panes looked clearer and more vibrant against a cloudy sky than a blue one.
This idea inspired his experimentation to separate the interior and exterior colors by adding a white layer in between, a "cloud," and as
he mastered the technical complexities, pushed the scale up to four feet in diameter.
Each work is speckled with color, which comes from rolling the molten glass in small shards of colored glass during the blowing process. To complete the piece, he adds a lip wrap of a contrasting color.

GLASSHOUSE AND
GLASSHOUSE SCULPTURE
The Glasshouse is the centerpiece of Chihuly Garden and Glass.
Throughout his career, Chihuly dreamed of working on the design for a glasshouse and the artwork within it. This is the first opportunity he has had to realize that dream. The design draws inspiration from two of his favorite buildings: Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and the Crystal Palace in London. Chihuly signed a beam during the dedication ceremony on May 21, 2012.
The Glasshouse Sculpture is an expansive 100-foot-long installation in a palette of reds, oranges, yellows and amber. Made of many individual elements, it is one of Chihuly's largest suspended sculptures. Chihuly calls the intensely colored blown-glass forms of this monumental work Persians. The perception of the artwork varies greatly with natural light and as the day fades into night.
Chihuly is pictured here admiring the magnificent Palm House at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, near London, which is one of his favorite conservatories. His appreciation of this nineteenth-century architecture comes in part from the use of hand-blown glass to make all the windows, something extraordinary considering the size of the buildings. In 2005, thirty years after this photo was taken, Chihuly was invited to show his artwork at Kew.
Glasshouses come in many beautiful sizes and shapes and are some of the most incredible buildings in the world. When you walk through them, you feel peaceful and inspired.
- Dale Chihuly

CHANDELIER WALKWAY
Chinuly creates an architectural sequence with dynamic colors and forms along the Chandelier Walkway.
Sunset Chandelier
Mighty Citron Chandelier
Royal Jo Chandelier
Fly Yellow Chandelier
Emerald Chandelier
Olympic Blue and Turquoise Chandelier
Alfa Red ChandelierRead more