Rotunda Glass Floor Offers Unique Window To Capitol Building History

(Source: MIRS.news, Published 06/12/2026) Laying on the glass floor in the Capitol rotunda is a memorable photo opportunity for visitors to downtown Lansing.

The soon-to-completed renovations to the nearly 150-year-old glass floor have revealed some unique history and may lead to future tools.

Michigan State Capitol Commission Executive Director Robert Blackshaw told MIRS when the scaffolding for the rotunda restoration project was torn down — and a couple of glass tiles broke — that they looked at the unique glass floor.

“We thought to ourselves, ‘You know, this thing has never been restored.’ We know that over the years a number of pieces have been replaced, but it was never replaced with the original specifications of glass that was installed,” Blackshaw said.

He said they got permission from the Capitol Commission to look into a full restoration of the glass tiles to the original 1879 specifications. It took 25 years to find a glassmaker that could reproduce the block, but for around $1 million, they're hopeful to finish this summer.

Blackshaw said he was at a preservation technology conference when he ran into a company called Lucid Glass Studio that has a shop in Providence, Rhode Island, and took a tour of their facility. The company had worked on similar glass floors in Chicago.

“They came out, and it was kind of like an archeological dig. We pulled a piece of glass, and they looked at it, and at first I thought this was an original piece of glass,” he said.

The original glass for the floor had come from England and was made using what is called a “hot pour” on to stone. The Lucid representative quickly noted that the piece Blackshaw had pulled was hot poured on sand and had instead come from the 1930s instead of the 1870s.

Blackshaw said historians were consulted, and it was found that part of the glass floor was damaged after a cigar stand went up in flames. To make the fix, a company in Pennsylvania was contracted to make the replacement glass, but it wasn’t made to the same specifications.

“Once we identified that, we started looking around and, with their help, identified half of the pieces were from the 1930s, and I’ll say another quarter was from miscellaneous companies from broken pieces over the years,” he said.

Lucid Glass Studio was given a piece of the original glass floor and was able to match the original 1870s configuration that would be used to replace nearly 700 glass tiles.

“There’s still about 200 of the 970-some pieces on the floor that are original,” he said.

Lucid and Beacon Design were able to take some of the old glass floor pieces and use them for the 2025 Capitol Christmas Ornaments too.

According to reporting by WPRI, a CBS affiliate in Providence, Lucid Co-Owner Mark Morin said each glass replica tile takes 26 hours to cool after being hot poured into a graphite bed.

The Capitol Building Facebook page posted a short video of the hot pour process.

Lucid posted on their Instagram about getting the restoration project as well.

Blackshaw said they are on the final phase of the reconstruction project, and it should be done sometime in July, with the last phase being the octagon in the middle of the rotunda.

He said he was surprised to learn that many of the tiles weren’t original.

“Even some of the preservationists that worked there for years are fascinated with the story. I mean, it was really enlightening for everyone,” he said.

He said in the future that shouldn’t have to be the case. Using the old blueprints, a company 3D-scanned the building with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), creating a digital twin model of the whole building on a Preservation Intelligence Platform.

He said the platform has the repository for quick access. Trade workers and engineers won't need to spend three to four months researching what needs to be done.

He said the entire glass floor was gridded out electronically and each specific piece of glass is mapped.

“All that data is there for the future stewards of the building to really go back and not have to recreate the process. It’s all at their fingertips now," Blackshaw said. “The information age has come into helping us with that piece.”