The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

"The Pérez Art Museum Miami: Built for People" @wsj By Julie V. Iovine 

Miami

The new Pérez Art Museum that opened here last week embodies a vernacular style—deep-shaded, loose-limbed and connected to the tropics—that should have been but never was because of those two invasive species, Art Deco and the air conditioner.

Now called PAMM, the museum was designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the versatile Swiss architecture firm that renovated the Park Avenue Armory in New York and designed both the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island and the Beijing National Stadium, known as the Bird's Nest, for the Olympics there. Here the architects have composed a $131-million structure that might have been conceived by Robinson Crusoe channeling Mies van der Rohe using only materials close at hand—including fern-and-flower-covered "logs."

Two vast and flat platforms sandwich a deep-set array of glass walls and concrete blocks with a broad verandah and upper balcony circling around. The whole is then raised up on stilts just high enough above the flood plain to catch the breezes off Biscayne Bay and keep the parking underneath and out of sight. Suspended vertically from the roof like Seminole totems to the jungle gods, dozens of 50-foot logs—actually watering pipes wrapped in felt and covered in local and South American flora by French landscape consultant Patrick Blanc —lend the verandah a primordial lushness. The greenery also helps to modulate an outdoor space that might otherwise have felt too monumental (an issue with the barren overhang at the Parrish museum).

The architects' conceit to draw on a local context that doesn't quite exist makes PAMM stand out in both attractive and awkward ways. After all, Miami has become a city for cars hurtling people in air-conditioned pods across islands and lagoons to deliver them to air-conditioned, decorated boxes. In some parts of downtown, where the new museum is located, it takes a native's know-how to cross the street because of all the under- and overpasses, bridges, fly-bys and freeways. In spite of being a skipping stone away from one of the busiest of those freeways, the MacArthur Causeway, PAMM pretends that Miami is still an outdoor paradise with the museum nestled in its midst rather than perched at the edge of a waterfront largely cut off from the city.

The 1930s heyday of Miami architecture sports an Art Deco swank, while newer buildings—like the AmericanAirlines Arena—go for shiny sculpture. But PAMM doesn't promote a look so much as a sense of place. Its message that the museum experience can be informal and inviting is underscored by Adirondack chairs scattered across the verandah and by the way that the architecture fluidly connects landscape to space, outdoors to indoors, people to art.

In this expansive design, spaces seem to pour around art-covered walls; discrete galleries for more focused exhibits are not arranged in strict sequence but rather pop up as choice stopovers. A pared-down palette of materials, basically concrete, wood and gypsum in a range of finishes—painted, polished, hammered and raw—provides a pleasing consistency, enriching texture and also subtle cues regarding curatorial presentation. The art hung in the more open spaces feels a bit random. But the medium-size galleries, where art hangs directly on concrete cast to a velvet finish and the doors and windows are framed in wood, feel intimate and engaging. Borrowing the same fluorescent-tube scheme of linear tracks that they deployed so successfully at the Schaulager, a storage and exhibition space in Basel, Switzerland, the architects mingle artificial and abundant daylight throughout the building without striving for elaborate effects.

But Herzog & de Meuron's most unconventional move was to conflate the grand staircase and auditorium. In most museums, auditoriums are enclosed in sound-proofed luxury somewhere at the back of the house. Here the auditorium doubles as a hang-out space and stair right in the middle of things. A lower section is simply bleachers carved from the wooden steps climbing to the second floor; the upper portion is more like rows of cushioned pews. The appeal to "a younger audience" (as the press materials put it) is loud and clear.

The informality of the auditorium and other relaxed touches—such as doors for coming and going on every side of the building, square wooden beams spread with seeming randomness across the roof for shade, and guard rails filled out with plastic mesh fencing—are counterbalanced and elevated by a regard for classical proportion that holds it all together. Ceiling heights are grand, and from certain angles the entire 384-foot length of the space is viewable at a glance. But details from the hand-width wood planks to the serrated undersides of poured concrete overhangs constantly relate everything back to human scale. A vast utilities and storage facility is discreetly contained within a concrete bunker anchoring one corner of the complex.

The human factor has played a big part in the museum's rejiggering its original mission: from kunsthalle to a collecting institution in its own right. At the opening last week, as construction teams worked overtime on finishing touches, a fence along the entrance drive was printed with this come-on: "Open for Sunbathing. Open for Dinner. Open for Romance." If it still remains to be seen what kind of collection PAMM will become, it is already abundantly clear that Herzog & de Meuron understood well the part about making PAMM a Miami destination.

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.