CONCRETE DREAMS
Wandering aimlessly through a museum, with breaks as needed for food and drink, is my idea of heaven. But I couldn’t exit the The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, quickly enough. The facility, designed by HOK, opened in 2011 to house the largest private collection of Dali works outside of the artist’s own, which are housed in their own museum in Figureras, Spain.
The St. Petersburg museum is strange without being arresting. It’s a four-story concrete block with blue-green geodesic bubble windows. This metaphor – the subconscious erupting from the conscious, the biological from the mechanical, the fantastic from the banal – is a facile one, and entirely fitting for Dali. But it’s an extremely difficult one to render skillfully in architecture. The forms’ proportions and expression are clumsy. The concrete shell has the feeling of a generic utility building, housing switching machines or parked cars. And the window’s triangular panes are mounted on a steel frame that feels unnecessarily heavy.
The building’s greatest flaw is its small, pinched scale. I visited on a Sunday afternoon, when there were long lines at the ticket booth, the gift store, the restroom, the courtyard cafe, and the elevators. The central atrium was noisy, warm, and smelled of stale food. The galleries were oppressively crowded, so that a visitor had to wait several minutes to find a clear view to each painting. The niches where Dali’s monumental paintings are hung, including The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, don’t give them enough breathing room, and can’t contain the crowds waiting to look at them, who spill into adjacent galleries. Spending more than a minute with each work, in contemplation, is simply not possible. The grand, squiggling, spiral stair at the center of the atrium is too small to allow visitors moving up and down to pass each other easily, and too large to allow visitors on the ground floor to move around it easily.
Dali’s large paintings, like The Discovery, are orchestrated magnificently, with overlapping perspectives that offer imaginative depth, dreamy, erotically-charged forms, and obsessive, classical craftsmanship. There’s none of any of this to be found in the building.