Art sparkles in FSU's new reading room
By Bayard Stern
Assistant Editor, Florida State Times
The enormous new stained-glass window in the Werkmeister reading room in Dodd Hall is not depicting saints, but symbols of FSU abound.
The glass fits well in the majestic reading room with heart-pine vaulted wood ceilings and walls of books. Named the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Humanities Reading Room, it honors a couple of humanities giants who have given the university intellectual leadership and plain money gifts.
Mrs. Werkmeister, widow of the philosophy professor and a humanities scholar herself, praised the stained-glass project in August, even before she had seen it.
"It reminds me of the stability of the Middle Ages," she said.
The stability includes a mahogany frame handmade by Brian Kimball and a stained-glass window 23 feet tall and 10 feet wide. It has 22 panels with 10,000 individual pieces of glass.
"You know that the marvelous old rooms on which this room was modeled frequently have stained glass," said FSU President Sandy D'Alemberte. "If you have been to Oxford or Cambridge or the Inns of Court in London and seen their great halls you can quickly visualize what this room will look like when there is stained glass in the windows."
The creators of the glass were not shipped in from Italy, but are FSU alumni who met each other in the Sweet Shop, near Dodd Hall.
Bob and Jo Ann Bischoff, both graduated in 1972, have been married 27 years and work together full-time. They live in Quincy, and in their back yard is the studio, which is a renovated barn. Though they live and work in north Florida, the Bischoffs are internationally known.
"In the last fifteen years we haven't done much local work at all," Bob Bischoff said. "We do a lot of work in South America, Japan, France, England and India. We're more internationally known for our carved glass. We did the U.S. Embassy and the Plaza Hotel in Santiago, Chile. We did residences all over South America."
On the FSU project, the Bischoffs have worked closey with Ivan Johnson, a professor emeritus, who developed the pattern for the window with Jo Ann Bischoff.
"Ivan and I had worked together as student and professor when I was in school," Bob Bischoff said.
Making and assembling the stained glass is complex. Engineering is involved. The entire piece will weigh upwards of 2,000 pounds, so it has to be structurally sound. Each piece of glass has about 13 or 14 steps, so there were about 140,000 handl-ings of the glass.
"It's a lot of pressure I didn't used to be gray before we started," Jo Ann Bischoff said laughing.
The glass is a tribute to FSU and, like any original art, one of a kind. Images of Westcott, the fountain, Dodd Hall, the University Center and Bryan Hall are depicted.
"We wanted the sky to shade, which is an unusual request," Bob Bischoff said. "I met up with a glass-blower named Jim Flannagan in Seattle for special colors. All of the sky and some of Westcott is hand-blown glass. We wanted it to look like the sky does at sunset or sunrise, with the sky going from dark to light.
"We made a change that I think is real good. There's only foliage at the very bottom, and originally we were thinking about palm trees, which seemed real Florida-like, but not really Florida-State-like. So what we came up with is a dogwood tree with the blossoms. So we put the palm tree in, but what we also did was put a dogwood-tree limb right in the front in the foreground with the dogwood blossoms. We both went to Florida State, and when I think of university, I think of it as spring."
The project is massive in scope, and had some complications before the glass could even be started. The original window frame, which held clear glass, could not be restored.
"It was an ornate and intricate frame in a historic building," Bob Bischoff said. "And that's really what stalled the project for a long time. What they ended up doing was building the frame out of mahogany. It's beautiful."
The unveiling of the stained glass and rededication of Bryan Hall will be in the Werkmeister reading room on Oct. 31 during Homecoming. The festivities start at 10:30 a.m.
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