BOCA RATON FLA.- The Boca Raton Museum of Art has undertaken a major renovation of its exterior landscape. Designed by Glavovic Studio and Studio Roberto Rovira, this $1.8 million project achieves a new prominent visibility for the Museum located in Mizner Park. The museum, which was built in 2001 on a site along Federal Highway, is situated within the most trafficked and pedestrian-friendly area of Boca Raton. The project which began in November 2017 is anticipated to be completed by the end of August.
The Museum building, originally designed by Architect, Donald Singer, is a classic postmodern structure with its bold volumes abounding with cornices, windows, and rusticated masonry that are emblematic and evocative of Addison Mizner’s Mediterranean Revival architecture of the 1920s that has left a distinctive and indelible stamp on Boca Raton.
Over the past 16 years, the Museum has been somewhat camouflaged by the Mizner Park Amphitheater, built immediately after the completion of the Museum and directly to its east. In particular, the main entrance to the Museum, originally designed as a welcoming entrance to the art galleries from the Park, now appears as a side door; and the loading dock gate, which currently fronts the restaurants and retail in Mizner Park, and by default is the Museum’s most noticeable façade, unfortunately and unofficially serves as the “face” of the Museum. How best to create a new relationship between the Museum and the changing dynamics of its environs has been the challenge of the design team of Glavovic Studio and Studio Roberto Rovira – one which they have solved brilliantly.
The project represents a very strategic, but comprehensive, reimaging of the museum’s public facing exteriors. In addition to repainting and re-lighting the building as well as introducing helpful signage, the project includes the introduction of the new winding walkways which will be lined with native grasses anchoring the edifice in an imaginative and welcoming public space.
The loading dock gate is being replaced with a 12-foot high screen of metal, mirrored, and acrylic panels designed by Margi Glavovic Nothard of Glavovic Studio, an architecture and design firm based in Fort Lauderdale. Entitled Mending Wall (an homage to the poem written a century ago by Robert Frost), the gate presents a new relationship with visitors who can see at one glance through the porous screen into the activities of the Museum loading dock while also seeing their own reflections. The gated partition continues around the southwest corner as a vertical 12-foot green wall of Bougainvillea, Creeping Fig, Garlic Vine, Queen’s Wreath, and Wild Allamanda.
“Our goal is to create the kind of dynamic outdoor environment that we strive for in our Museum’s galleries. Nothard and landscape architect Roberto Rovira have ensured that the landscape, the architecture, and the art are integrated without barriers or boundaries and their collaboration has made for a stunning large-scale commission that extends into the city,” said Irvin Lippman, Executive Director, Boca Raton Museum of Art.
“We have worked closely with the Museum to provide spaces that invite people to experience and celebrate the environment and culture of Boca Raton and South Florida, and especially, to enjoy the unique ongoing programming at the Museum,” said architect Margi Glavovic Nothard.
Three new elements are being introduced as artworks incorporated into the Museum.
Mending Wall, designed by Margi Glavovic Nothard, is a 75’ linear structure comprised of repetitious vertical aluminum panels (12’ high x ¼” thick in 8 various widths, from ½” to 4” wide and spaced from 1” to 4” apart and 9” deep). The sandwich panel structure is lit from within and from outside. The panels are three different dark to light greys and translucent acrylic on the outer layer with bright yellow and polished mirror stainless steel panels on the inner layer. The spacing between the panels is calibrated to create dynamic movement from west to east towards the Museum entrance. The pattern captures changes in daylight between solid and void and encourages southeast breezes through the loading dock while incorporating the functional requirements of a loading dock gate.
Promenade, designed by Glavovic Nothard with landscaping by Rovira, is a 27,000-square-foot outdoor space for large-scale exhibitions and pedestrian experiences that is conceived of as an extension of the Museum’s Sculpture Garden and as a place to engage the public directly in the experience of art with changing exhibition programming. An undulating pathway through the area provides multiple locations for installations.
The Cloud Wall, a commissioned work by the late Geoffrey Hendricks. This large watercolor time series grid of daytime skies presents a progression of shifting cumulus cloud patterns on a blue field, completely covered with a perforated vinyl the two-story windows (33’ x 20’) on the west side of the Museum. The work is a super-enlargement of an original watercolor the artist painted on June 3, 1983, in Berlin, Germany, as part of a limited edition of “sky progressions.” Hendricks was a forerunner of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s. The Museum is fortunate that his working with Senior Curator Kathy Goncharov, Hendricks chose the watercolor and the design of the installation before his death on May 12, 2018, representing his final artistic work.
In addition, the Museum will install works from its sculpture collection by John Henry, Jim Dine, Hanneke Beaumont, and Fletcher Benton along the new Promenade creating a new public place for visitors to encounter art.
