HOK along with Beck Group have designed the new museum to house the work of Spanish surreal artist Salvador Dali’s mysterious artwork. Though the museum is designed as a treasure box that shelters the collection from hurricanes behind thick concrete walls, the box opens in ways that welcome and intrigue visitors.
The new location of the Salvador Dalí Museum adjacent to the Mahaffey Theater on the downtown waterfront will house the world’s most comprehensive collection of art by Salvador Dali. The building is designed to house gallery space, a theatre, retail store and community space, classrooms, and a library and research archive.
The new museum has more than 900 triangular-shaped pieces of glass that make up what is called ‘the Igloo’ that is about 45ft tall and ‘the Enigma’, which is more than 75ft tall. These panels have been engineered, manufactured and installed by Novum Structures. Each of the structures is notable for individual design, and no two structures are identical in the entire project. HOK received the Novum Structures Design Excellence Award for the design of the Salvador Dalí Museum under the Specialty Clad Structure Category.
The ‘Enigma’ glass structure that ruptures from the building and forms the atrium roof and cascades to the ground is considered as the first use of this type of free-form geometry in the US. Another distinct feature of the museum project is the spiral staircase in the shape of a DNA strand. This design represents Dali’s obsession with Deoxyribonucleic acid.
Dalí Museum’s new 66,450 square feet building features 50% more space allotted for the 2,100 pieces of the permanent Salvador Dali collection.
The Salvador Dalí Museum houses the largest collection outside Europe of the works of the artist Salvador Dalí. The original museum opened in 1982, and in 2007, the museum sold the building to University of South Florida St. Petersburg for $6 million in anticipation of moving into the new facility. The construction on the new facility commenced on 12 December 2008. The basic design objective was to protect the most significant collection of Salvador Dali’s art while creating a new museum with iconic presence.
