© St. Petersburg Times, published June 15, 2002
It's not what I'd expected.
The design of the new building for the Tampa Museum of Art, unveiled Friday by architect Rafael Vinoly, is both less and more than anything I'd envisioned. And as such, it may be just right.
It is more in that it takes the entire site of the cultural arts district into account, and takes it very seriously. This project has always been at least as much about urban redesign as it has been about art. The museum building addresses many of the things about this area of downtown that are truly awful and makes them, if short of wonderful, well ... intriguing, certainly more comfortable and probably even aesthetic.
The building acts as a sort of corridor in itself, a one-step process in the redesign of Ashley Drive from an arid street that serves cars whizzing by into a pedestrian boulevard. It is a long structure, built right up to the street, flowing from Madison almost to Zack.
As such, it works as a visual connector between the buildings at 400 Ashley, including the skyscraper I refuse to call the beer can building, and the Poe Parking Garage. Much of that space is connected by a trellis-like roof, or urban canopy, which will provide shade and cast shadow onto the street as well as lower the temperature 10 to 15 degrees.
This trellis roof extends out onto Ashley to the median. How the city is going to deal with slowing or diverting through traffic away from the museum entrance I don't know, but it can be done.
The museum building itself is the opposite of a fortress. It is open to the city and to the public until you get upstairs via a gently sloping ramp that leads to the official entrance. This is one of the aspects I liked in Vinoly's other work; Philadelphia's new performing arts center incorporates an urban park, so you can enjoy the space, even if you don't have a concert ticket. So it is here.
The building is designed to be walked through to the surrounding park area and the riverfront. In the drawings, only lollipop trees surround it; clearly landscaping will be a major contributor to the final design.
You'll be able to enter the museum shop, cafe and garden cafe from the street. What Vinoly has created is, in effect, a combination of an art museum and a large desirable public space. The two should act in symbiotic fashion, each one drawing people to the other. And once people are there, of course, other businesses will follow -- restaurants, shops and so on -- and voila! The north end of downtown is transformed. Or such are our hopes.
That is the more than I'd expected. The art museum building is not just the first step in the redesign of this area, it goes a long way toward being the redesign itself.
The less might not really be less. The building itself, from the inside, is spectacular, open everywhere, bringing the outside in, exactly the opposite of the claustrophobic design of no-window museums that entomb you, forcing you to look at the art or else. I believe the interior will work beautifully. I can't wait to go.
It's the building from the outside that I'm not sure about. It's largely transparent, an idea I like. But I can't really get the sense of how the real thing will look. It so bends itself to the site and to air and the sky around it, I'm not sure if there will appear to be a there there. On the other hand, perhaps that is the genius to it.
"It is a wow!" a woman in the audience said after the presentation, using the word the mayor told Vinoly he wanted to describe the museum building.
She could be right. It is a wow, and even it's not, that may be a good thing. My fear about Architectonica, one of the firms that competed for this project, was that we'd have one wow! building and the rest of the city would just sit there.
That is not the case here.
We've got something terrific -- whether you ever go into the museum or not.
- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com. City Life appears on Saturday.