READING -- On a tour of the GoggleWorks studios, you'll meet artists like Sandra Kaye, who did 20 test firings before perfecting vividly colored glass sushi trays, as well as bowls, platters and tiles out of fused glass.

Nathaniel Walker Dubbs photographs water towers, wind turbines and other objects on the industrial landscape, then transfers those images in glowing colors onto hand-blown black glass plates.

Some artists take their work outside. At a September gala, the front of the GoggleWorks' main building became Lyn Godley's canvas. As night fell, Godley unveiled a display of 1,700 light-emitting diodes that took her a year to create.

In developing the GoggleWorks as a giant interactive arts center, department store founder Al Boscov encouraged Diane LaBelle, the center's executive director, to think big.

So, in addition to artists' studios, there's a cafe with an outdoor deck, dance and music studios, a 130-seat movie theater with regular screenings, a gift shop, and, on the upper floors, office space for 25 cultural groups. A new kiln just opened and a raku kiln is going to be installed. The artists who rent studios here work in a variety of mediums and can exhibit their work in one of the building's galleries.

The growth in American glass studios during the last half of the 20th century can be traced partly to gatherings of artisans who met twice in 1962 for the first glass workshops ever held at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.

The first workshop was organized by Harvey Littleton, now considered the father of American glass and, at the time, a ceramics teacher at the Toledo Museum. At one workshop, Dominick Labino, a chemist for Johns-Manville Fiber Glass Corp., showed participants how to melt a kind of marble called Johns-Manville 475.

Dale Chihuly, the renowned glass sculptor whose recent 10-month exhibition at Phipps Conservatory in Oakland attracted more than 400,000 visitors, studied with Littleton at the University of Wisconsin. The Toledo seminar fired Labino's imagination. In 1963, he set up a workshop where he developed new technologies, methods and tools that freed artists from relying on glass factories to produce their work and allowed them to create in their own studios.

Starting in the late 1970s, glass studios began opening within a 50-mile radius of Philadelphia and today there at least 35.

Magan Stevens, one of the glass artisans at GoggleWorks, has received training from the Pilchuck Glass School outside of Seattle, known as the premier glass school in the country.

Blowing hot glass, she said, is like perfecting your golf game -- expensive and frustrating. "It's physically taxing. I used to make big pieces. You have to keep your hands agile."

Earlier in her career, at the Corning Museum of Glass in 1997, Stevens learned new techniques from Lino Tagliapietra, a glass maestro from the Italian island of Murano.

Tagliapietra taught technique to scores of American glass artists, sharing knowledge once held as closely as trade secrets by his colleagues.

"They come over here and they're like rock stars," Ms. Stevens said. "A lot of the learning is visual. It's like a painter learning Impressionism or Realism."

Admission to the GoggleWorks Center for the Arts, 201 Washington St., is free and so is parking. A community open house, held on the second Sunday of every month, features tours of artists' studios, workshops, dance and music performances and art exhibitions.

The GoggleWorks is open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sundays. For more information, visit the Web site www.goggleworks.org or call 1-610-374-4600.