EATEN AWAY
On the inside, Miami’s Perez Art Museum is everything one expects from a Herzog & De Meuron building: smart, spare, ingeniously composed, and finely detailed. Its galleries are perfectly scaled for modern and contemporary art: large enough for full-blown installations, and small enough to foster intimacy. These rooms, smooth-skinned concrete boxes, are stacked in a loose pinwheel pattern with broad halls in between to wander.
What’s most surprising is the way the building is eroded at its edges. Its core, the cluster of galleries, is wrapped with a broad concrete patio and covered with wood slats, and its open courtyards are decorated with hanging column-like gardens. From the outside the building has no clear form – no straightforward profile, and no iconic image. (The richest, most descriptive photographs of it available online are those taken during construction, before the building was covered and the landscape around it had grown in.) It’s as if the tropical air and sun are eating away at the museum’s rough, handsome brutalist structure. I visited on a wet, windy day, and rain splattered through the roof slats, rose in a mist from the deck, and dripped from the swaying planters. Yet the patio, though exposed, was comfortable; one felt sheltered there by the building.
It’s a shame that the galleries themselves are isolated, visually and spatially, from the outside. Many have full-height windows, but when I visited the blinds were pulled down and one couldn’t see out to the patio below, the ocean beyond, and the sky above. Why didn’t the architects offer fixed views to the outside from galleries, and into the galleries from the outside? The building’s expressive, porous outer shell offers a primal experience of the elements, but its interiors remain closed off.
