Dream State - the New Dali Museum

(Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, FL)Slithering across the humid, subtropical landscape like the pocket watches in Persistence of Memory, the Dali Museum recently opened its new building in St. Petersburg, Florida. The surreal architecture boasts of a glass geodesic structure flowing freely in and out of a box building. Architect Yann Weymouth of HOK Architects who conceived the design was inspired by the organic dreamlike paintings of Salvador Dali. 

(Salvador Dali)Dali was born in Catalonia, Spain in 1904, studied at the Academy in Madrid, and eventually moved to Paris where he met Picasso and artists of the surrealist art movement. Influenced by these artists, Dali began to move away from his more rigid art training and develop his own expressive technique. In the 1920s, surrealism was a cultural movement affecting art, poetry, literature, film, and philosophy that dealt with what was beneath the façade of man, the unconscious and dreams. In his most famous work, Persistence of Memory, where watches melted into the landscape, Dali believed that time was not fixed and instead relative.  Dali often painted dreamlike landscapes rife with religious, sexual, and scientific symbols. He became fascinated with geometric forms such as the cube and the spiral DNA form. 

(The Persistance of Memory, courtesy of MOMA)Fittingly, architect Weymouth created a spectacular staircase arising in a twisting helix-DNA form, dominating the museum’s interior. The structure is opened up by the glass geodesic panels and provides great viewing of the St. Petersburg waterfront. No two glass panels are identical, creating dramatic backdrops as seen in the museum café below. It is a difficult mission for any architect to marry the rigid dictates of museum needs for straight walls with the more fluid, amorphous aesthetic of Salvador Dali yet Yann Weymouth did just that with the new museum. He took the geodesic sphere, made famous by Buckminster Fuller, and exploded it to this melting shape and still provided the straight walls needed to hang paintings.

(Dali Museum Helix Staircase and Cafe)The museum’s paintings were part of a collection started in 1943 by Eleanor Reese Morse and her husband A. Reynolds Morse. The couple saw a Dali retrospective and was entranced by his work.  Consequently, A. Reynolds Morse bought the painting Daddy Longlegs of the Evening, Hope! for his new wife. Over the next 40 years, the Morses would amass a significant collection that eventually needed its own building.  They built a museum for it in Beachwood, Ohio in 1971 and then by 1982, moved the collection to a bigger building in St. Petersburg, Florida. The collection expanded and outgrew its space again. Eventually HOK Architects were hired to design a new museum which opened this past January. 

The Dali Museum owns many of Dali’s masterpieces, including The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus and the Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, part of the collection of 96 oil paintings.  The rest of Dali’s oeuvre resides at his museum in Figueres, Spain, the Teatre-Museu Dali. 

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Comments

[Nigelinspain]

The design of the building certainly matches the artwork it houses. I think the architect has done a really good job in creating his own masterpiece.

I have always loved Dali´s paintings and so for a building to house such an abundance of his work is a must do place to visit.

[joyi]

your knowledge that you to leave with us!

[MCDONALDS MENU]

This article was very useful to me, I will subscribe to your blog

[eddie]

I liked reading this article. Years ago I studied architecture and am still interested in it.,
I am more interested in using normal products as a form of art.
What was the start of this all I think was the Movado Museum Watch in 1947
Will keep coming back to read more comments and articles
Eddie

[Decorator Cornwall]

Unfortunately my work is never going to be in a museum as I am just a poor lowly interior decorator in Cornwall

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Hi I am tailor kidd and i am a great fan of musiam. At the last summer i have visited a musiam with my whole family. My doughter sayna
told me papa when i will have a baby i will take it to this musiam. Ha ha ha .....

[Melly Lifshitz]

Salvador Dali is one of the most talented artist in history. His works deserve to be displayed in high-class museums.

[painters liverpool]

Yes have to agree Salvador Dali is my all time best artist.

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[TBFG]

No two glass panels are identical, creating dramatic backdrops as seen in the museum café below.

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Good article,good information ,I like to read this.

[Johny G]

I love watches. I think they are just fantastic pieces of modern technology, and in this case "art." A good wrist watch is always nice to have as well!