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St Petersburg, Florida
A tiny man would tell a little joke and get a tiny laugh from all the folks
This is the stair at HOK's Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, right on the shore of Tampa Bay. The museum houses only Dali paintings and its collection includes my new Dali favorite (not pictured), The Discovery of America by Christopher, a massive fifteen foot high painting with all of the visual trickery and dense imagery you could ever hope for.
As for the museum, I have no Idea at all why it is on St Petersburg, Florida, and while it is overall a little more interesting of a building than most, it does not quite rise to the occasion as the ultimate building for the ultimate surrealist. I would have to think there are generations of architecture students who all had a studio project based on this very premise, and any one of them would have probably ended up a little more appropriate than what got built.
Speaking of architecture, in Lakeland, Florida (not all that far from Tampa and St Petersburg) is Florida Southern College, the largest complex of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in existence. This is late era Wright, but most definitely still Wrightian, with some buildings on campus (of course) being better than others. My favorite part was actually not even a building (although the chapels were quite nice) but rather the shade canopy that connects the buildings, a geometrically fun structure that sometimes felt a bit too low buy very Wrightian.
Heading off from Tampa and St Petersburg in a totally different direction, we’re now headed south to Sarasota to see the beautiful but badly named Ca d'Zan mansion. This was the winter home of John Ringling, as in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, and “Ca d'Zan” actually means “House of John” in Venetian, which makes sense since John Ringling’s name was John and the house is most certainly Venetian. Ca d'Zan is tourable as part of the Ringling Museum, a complex that also includes garden, a surprisingly large art museum and a less surprisingly large circus museum.
That less surprisingly large circus museum is actually not only large, but likely the best circus museum that you will ever visit. In addition to all of the expected things, the circus museum really shines once you find your way into the miniature circus models, an almost endless parade of exceptionally well detailed and complex models that need to be seen to be appreciated.
Before we leave Tampa and St Petersburg, we’re left to wonder why there are no pictures at all from Tampa but instead some last pictures from the somewhat dated St Petersburg Pier, where views of the bay are spectacular, but you have to be careful of the pelicans. They're everywhere... Everywhere...
We’re now on Governors Island in New York, which is getting increasingly more fun every summer and whose future looks better every year. Here near Fort Jay is "Face of Liberty" by Zaq Landsberg, a life size(ish) replica of the face of the Statue of Liberty which reminds you of that scene in Cloverfield where the monster conveniently throws the statue’s head into Manhattan. Luckily this time it was just an art installation and there were no Cloverfield monsters around, although its always worth checking since you can never be too careful when it comes to Cloverfield monsters.
“Face of Liberty” was part of a larger, summer art festival called Figment, one of my favorite annual events in the city along with the Young Architects Program at PS1 Warm Up, in fact I’ll usually do both in the same day on the first Saturday in July, a great way to start the summer every year.
When Louis Kahn dies in the men’s room at Penn Station, he supposedly had plans for this memorial, The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial on Roosevelt Island, in his cold dead hands, or possibly in a carry on suitcase or briefcase. Either way, the plans of a dead man (in this case a world famous architect) honoring another dead man (in this case FDR) finally came to fruition decades and decades later, as the FDR Four Freedoms Memorial finally opened at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. The memorial feels very much like a Louis Kahn design, although you would have to think that if he was alive that parts may have been a little different, a little more refined. Still, if you’re going to resurrect the plans of a dead man, this was a good one to try and do.
