ADVANCED INTERLAYER SOLUTIONS
The Dali Museum’s surreal art collection is on display in a new structure designed to resist coastal storms Located among rows of concrete buildings in hurricane-prone St. Petersburg, Florida, the new Dali Museum stands out. It’s a concrete and glass fortress protecting the museum’s highly valued Salvador Dali art collection from powerful hurricane winds and heavy wind-borne debris.
The museum’s striking use of exterior glass opens up the interior to brilliant Florida daylight, while creating broad views of sparkling Tampa Bay. The outside-comes-inside design effect creates a welcoming and well-lit space that’s perfect for displaying the work of an extraordinary artist.
Originally created in 1982, the Dalí Museum is home to the largest collection of artwork by Dalí outside of Europe. The collection features over 2,000 pieces of Dalí’s artwork from every period of his life. In early 2011, the museum was relocated onto the St. Petersburg waterfront and reconstructed in a style more suiting to the 20th century surrealist artist that it pays homage to.
This new museum consists of a 17.7 m-(58-ft)-tall concrete box with two 75.5-ft-tall glazed glass structures “melting” over it, reminiscent of the melting clocks in Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory. The glass atriums, affectionately named the Enigma after Dalí’s The Enigma of Desire and the Igloo, are built with 1,062 unique triangular glass panels framed by 3,000 steel pieces. Inside, a soaring concrete spiral staircase connects the ground floor to the galleries on the third floor, leading all the way up to the roof of the glass atrium.
Yann Weymouth, head of the design team from HOK, explains, “Our challenge was to discover how to resolve the technical requirements of the museum and site in a way that expresses the dynamism of the great art movement that he [Dalí] led.”
The task of bringing HOK’s vision to life was assigned to Novum Structures. Novum used a free-form structural system and edge-clamped glass system to glaze the museum. The structural system uses double node technology to create complex forms from simple geometric components. The edge-clamped glass system allows for easy installation of glass panels in a variety of angles. This first-ever combination of the two systems made it possible for complex shapes to stand without support columns.
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