An artistic and sustainable revitalization has surfaced along the downtown St. Petersburg waterfront with a $36 million addition. Green Architects at HOK, along with Beck Group sustainability consultants, have designed a new Dalí Museum to house the world-class burgeoning collected works of surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. The Dalí Museum is the largest collection of Dalí's work outside Spain consisting of 2,140 works by Dalí, including 96 oil paintings. The museum attracts over 200,000 visitors every year impacting the St. Petersburg economy by over $50 million.
The first directive of architect Yann Weymouth, a Senior Vice President at HOK, was to design an edifice to replace the original Dalí Museum that opened in a nondescript warehouse in 1982, with a subsequent addition in 1989. The new museum will officially open on Tuesday, January 11th, only eight blocks north of the current museum’s location in St. Petersburg, Florida. The 66,400 sq ft building will feature 15,000 sq ft of exhibition space across three galleries. Although designed with an environmentally friendly character, it's unclear if the project will seek official Green Building certifications. The facility will be built to protect the precious collection and withstand hurricane force winds.
Open To The Public:
January 11, 2011 (1-11-11), 11:11 a.m.
Dalí Museum
One Dalí Boulevard
St. Petersburg, FL 33701
(727) 823-3767
Dalí Museum Green Lighting
LED lights, much like those used on airport runways, have been embedded in the concrete floor beginning at the front entrance to the building that could lower building costs while increasing green business practices. LED lights are more efficient than incandescent and HID lights, making solar energy a very real potential power source in the future for the Sunshine City. By investing in LED lighting now, the Dalí Museum has helped to recession proof the business by reducing overhead and creating the potential to accumulate a budget surplus. By earning LEED credits and obtaining LEED certification there is also the possibility of facilitating preparations for the increasing global concerns over energy consumption and climate changes.
Sustainable Concrete Aspect
To protect against Florida’s powerful hurricanes, the art is located above the flood plane on the third floor and housed within cast-in-place, reinforced 18” thick concrete walls and a 12" thick roof slab. The building can protect the prized collection from up to a Category 5 hurricane storm surge and 165 mph winds. Concrete is widely recognized as a sustainable building material and contributes to achieving certification for most the LEED green building rating system, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The material will prove to be structurally efficient as well as inherently green with the capacity to reduce recurring embodied energy, possess high solar thermal performance, lower maintenance requirements and take advantage of long-term durability.
Eco-Friendly Environment
While the concrete protects the original art, the structure is broken and disrupted by an organic, triangulated glass enclosure, which consists of 1,062 unique triangulated glass panels. The “Glass Enigma” bubble structures contain 1 1/2 inches thick distinctive glass panels, made from three layers of glass and held together in a steel grid. The design is reminiscent of Dalí’s transition from his early work in Cubism to his later eccentric surrealist masterpieces.
The glass is insulated, reinforced, laminated and tempered but certified only for a Category 3 hurricane; which is acceptable because the windows do not cover any walls in the galleries, archives or the systems that keep the art at controlled temperatures if damaged in a storm. There are windowless rectangles on the north and south sides that can be sealed by metal roll-down shutters. Nestled at the base of the stunning “Glass Enigma” is a freestanding, reinforced concrete staircase; the distinctive structure was built using poured-in-place concrete, a deviation from the architect’s original planned steel staircase, resulting in a $600,000 cost savings.
Local Plants in Cultivated Areas
The building features a vertical garden of local Florida plants that sprout, along with small fountains of water, helping to increase the structure’s thermal performance. Landscape architect Phil Graham of Graham-Booth Landscape Architecture designed the grounds lush with flowering shrubs and trees dotted with Florida limestone slabs that suggest the primordial rocks of Dalí's Catalonian homeland that he constantly painted into his landscapes. The Avant Gardens, coined by museum director Hank Hine, aims to act as a foundation for Spanish and Catalan heritage.
###
HOK Green Goal
HOK's buildingSMART technology allows designers to integrate sustainability goals into standard design processes and to predict more reliably how a design will perform. The ability for the entire team to understand the site and local climate, analyze project performance and cost data from the beginning of design and continuing through the building's operations is a vital part of the effort to move toward holistic sustainability and energy-efficient, carbon neutral design. Those who work for HOK, even as the newest members of the firm, feel a responsibility to make the world a better place.
HOK Website | HOK buildingSMART Community | HOK Renew
Beck Group Sustainability
Beck is deeply committed to sustainable methods such as construction of LEED Certified projects and providing a full range of green building services. Their sustainability experience includes LEED evaluation, consulting, rating systems, building analysis, education and research. The overriding goal of Beck’s Sustainability Team is to incorporate sustainable design principles into every project regardless of LEED certification candidacy. Their focus is providing sustainable initiatives that provide maximum value that are easily applicable and can be implemented at little or no cost. The Beck team consists of more than 450 employees, with more than 35 percent certified LEED® APs.
Comments