Fragile though it may be, Venetian glass has had a remarkably powerful impact on the hearts and minds of architects, artists, and design aficionados the world over. And now, with the recent opening of Le Stanze del Vetro (“Rooms for Glass”), on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, in Venice, these pieces finally have a showplace worthy of their significance.

The museum is a joint venture by the canal-crossed city’s Fondazione Giorgio Cini and Pentagram Stiftung—a foundation established by art historian and philanthropist David Landau and his wife Marie-Rose Kahane, whose collection of 20th-century Murano glass is the institution’s inspiration. The project has transformed a 19th-century Napoleonic warehouse–turned–1950s boarding school into nine galleries designed to display rotating exhibits of the best Venetian glass of the last one hundred years. German-born, New York–based AD100 architect Annabelle Selldorf—whose projects include pristine, clean-lined galleries for David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, and Haunch of Venison—brought her minimalist sensibility to bear on the 4,400 square feet of elegant exhibition space.

Large windows, crisp white walls, and poured-concrete floors define the rooms, while Selldorf-designed vitrines display the glassworks, making for dramatically long views through the museum. “There is a notion of transparency and layering that permeates the entire project,” says Selldorf. “You can look back on and diagonally through the spaces, which allows you to relive the collective experience and also to preview what’s ahead.”

The inaugural exhibition, on view through November 29, celebrates Venetian architect and designer Carlo Scarpa’s work for the renowned Murano glassmaker Venini. The company’s innovative artistic director from 1934–47, Scarpa devoted himself to creating new types of glass and forms of glassware, finding inspiration in everything from the Wiener Werkstätte to ancient Rome to contemporary Asia.

In keeping with the institution’s plans to mount one historical and one contemporary show every year, an exhibition of living artists who use glass in their work will open in April 2013. Featuring pieces by Gerhard Richter, Rachel Whiteread, and Yayoi Kusama, among others, the show will provide yet more proof of glass’s continuing inspirational power.