Architects put on glitz to win museum gig

THOMPSON E-mail: Click here

© St. Petersburg Times,
published November 24, 2001

It was a heady event for 8:30 in the morning.

Arquitectonica, the Miami architectural firm with an international reputation, and a cadre of consultants -- a group of 10 altogether, all dressed in black -- marched to the front of the room at the Convention Center to give their pitch to design the new building for the Tampa Museum of Art.

It's a more or less a $45-million job, which attracted 33 firms, many of them internationally known. That list was narrowed to four, and Tuesday they came to Tampa to show and tell the city's selection committee why they're the best for the job.

For Arquitectonica, Bernardo Fort-Brescia did all the talking. A charming, intensely likable man, Fort-Brescia zoomed through every possible aspect of the project in a presentation so comprehensive you got the feeling you could give Arquitectonica the contract, fall asleep and wake up in March 2003, the target finish date, to a Wow! building brought in on budget that worked in every detail.

At the end of the presentation, someone in the audience asked, "May we hear from Laurinda Spear?"

She is Fort-Brescia's partner, and his wife, and, oh yes, the designer of these internationally acclaimed buildings. An almost overly serious-appearing woman (until she smiled, or you saw her sexy high-heels), she made a brief comment on the rush of excitement she feels when she walks into a well-designed building.

Their local partners are Rowe Architects.

Machado and Silvetti, a Boston firm, was paired with internationally acclaimed landscape architects Olin Partnership and local firm Gould Evans. Everyone got to talk.

Most of the attention was directed to the site -- what they see as the parks to the east and west of the new building. Jorge Silvetti, who would design the building, a cerebral guy and Harvard professor, talked about "dissolving the buildings into the landscapes, using the topography -- there is a whole floor of difference in the height of the two parks that are the museum site."

Trees would create convection drafts to cool the air; fountains would send water up, not down, which adds to the humidity. The result: the transformation of an underused and forbidding space into a lush urban environment of which the museum would be an integral and gracious part.

Next, Polshek Partnership Architects, a New York City firm with Tampa partners Gresham Smith and Sylla Inc. as well as minority-owed architecture firm Sylla Inc. to do the civil engineering. Jim Polshek, the former dean of the graduate school of architecture at Columbia University, gave a mesmerizing presentation, slide after slide of buildings designed over his long career.

He designs no commercial buildings, no houses, mostly non-profits, lots of museums.

Aware of the challenges of a museum today, he talked about alternative uses for the space: "I want to make the Tampa museum so desirable it's booked 365 days a year."

Like Arquitectonica's Fort-Brescia and Spear, he vowed to ignite donors at all fundraising events.

The last, Rafael Vinoly, also from New York, came by himself, joined only by his newly acquired Tampa partner, Albert Alfonso.

Vinoly, younger than Polshek and Silvetti, in a black sweater and jacket, sunglasses perched on top of his shock of salt-and-pepper hair, was iconoclastic, extemporaneous.

"What do I envision? I don't have the slightest idea, and I think you should be happy with that."

He didn't do much nuts and bolts, just showed slides and talked about recent and current projects, many of them won in competitions. The Clinton library in Little Rock is cantilevered over a river; a museum in South America has a rotating roof that follows the sun. In his performing arts hall in Philadelphia, he incorporated urban space to walk, sit, read -- "Open to all, not just people who can pay $120 for a ticket."

Why not him? It's the buildings, stupid.

Or is it?

These are people Tampa will be working with for the next 15 months. Next week, the selection committee recommends three of the four to the mayor. He picks one.

And, Dick, forget about widening the river into a lake. None of them like it.

- Sandra Thompson is a writer who lives in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com. City Life appears on Saturday.

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