The museum is offered to the city and is conceived within the dispersed urban fabric of the "Miami Design District" sector as a luminous cubic volume, as a “Magic Box”, a “Boite à Miracle”, open on its two north and south fronts through two perforated and reflective facades.
Description of project by Aranguren + Gallegos Arquitectos
The program of an institution such as the ICA Miami is already an attractive claim, but why deprive the spaces that host it of a certain degree of seduction?
To construct a space with a certain scenographic character, is not to renounce to know how to dose what sensations are wanted to cause to mark the identity of the new center.
An Art Center is many things. It is, above all, a way to build a vision of the world, create a plot based on the meaning of all his works and all the lines, more or less visible, that unite them. A Contemporary Art Center is a narrative that is based on the work of all the artists who make it up and show themselves in it.
The ICA Miami Museum also aims to be a context, a place in which the readings and re-readings of each work are conditioned and enhanced by the space that exposes them, from the halls to the global character of the building.
To express its avant-garde, contemporary and modern character, it is proposed, in the projected solution, to build a closed cubic building on its east and west sides and expressive and open on its south and north facades.
The south facade, is linearly supported on the road access road and will be the main access of the new museum. It is built with a metallic plane of aluminum pieces and triangular geometries, expressive and abstract, in which holes of light are perforated, accentuating the intended expressive radicality of the proposal. With this operation a "weightless space" is generated between the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. As a "great magnet" it catches us and transports us, with a certain power of seduction towards the interior of the new institution, provoking at the same time curiosity, anxiety and pleasure when visiting it.
The main entrance, understood as a transversal passage, transforms into the lobby of the museum, and at the same time communicates with the sculpture garden located in the north of the site. This south facade has a metallic, aluminum, bright, solar, mirror and announcement of various events that will occur inside the museum. As in the work of Leswis Carroll entitled "Alice through the Mirror", to cross it transports us to another reality, to an uncertain interior space. When the facade is closed, it protects the exhibition halls of the museum from the dominant solar impact in the south orientation. It is perforated with luminous hollows belonging to a triangular geometry resulting from a "fracture of the gaze", evocative of movements and lateral thrusts as a result of strong hurricane winds.
Under this metallic plane, in floatation, a horizontal strip is created in the plane of the street, a shadow on which the ICA MIAMI letters are cut out, large and deep, like the columns that support the building. With this game of letters a space is built, a gap, an atrium in the street that traps us and leads us inside the museum.
In contrast to the configuration of the southern front, a large vertical glass plane is built on the north facade that occupies practically the entire surface of the building front and allows the exhibition halls of different levels to be illuminated with natural light. establish a visual relationship between the interior of these rooms and the Sculpture Garden. This large glass plane makes it possible to support installations and temporary artistic creations made with adhesive vinyl on glass or with different lighting.
Beyond the north facade, the Sculpture Garden is created as a large open space suitable for events and events of diverse character. This garden allows to integrate the new museum with the adjoining residential fabric of smaller scale and with abundant landscaped spaces.
The rooms for exhibitions are neutral spaces, white, bright, with a sufficient height for installations of large format.
As the new trends advance, the concept of what is art and, consequently, its traditional exhibition space, comes into crisis. The diversity of means of representation requires that these spaces be modified. The museum we propose today must absorb these spatial, dimensional, conceptual (everyday, contextual, mutability), technical and pragmatic needs, with the clear difficulty that contemporary works of art are constantly breaking new schemes and forms of expression.
The ICA Miami Museum proposes in its interior suitable containers for artistic manifestations that are constantly rethinking its limits. They are well-dimensioned spaces, equipped with all the necessary facilities to be open to experimentation and prospecting, capable of trying new ways of exhibiting art and more recent productions.
It responds to a double function: to be a volume that houses and displays works and artistic installations and, at the same time, to be the same cultural object that assumes its dimension of urban reference. The center of contemporary art aims to be a new urban focus integrated and incorporated into the place, which articulate the various existing pieces and which even configures outdoor spaces.
Marc Augé differentiates place from space, anthropologically defining the place as an area that has acquired meaning from human activities that occur in it. Space, on the other hand, is meaningless because nobody feels attachment for it. The proposed contemporary art museum is not just a free space to exhibit works that arrive completed; It is a space that complements the work, or rather works with it. In this sense, the physical space, the immediate external context, the landscape, the flows, that the museum can offer and show, are variables of artistic creation. On the other hand, installations and technical support to achieve specific spatial, lighting and acoustic conditions acquire great importance in works of contemporary art.
Large rooms designed with programmatic flexibility and spaces are proposed for the new ICA Miami Museum. They will be subdivisible rooms, continuous tours inside and outside, with independent rooms, alternative exhibition spaces, rooms of vertical proportions and with studied degrees of transparency towards the exterior.
Definitely, the new ICA Miami Museum is a new meeting space, an "atrium" that is offered to the city, a new "threshold" between the always new and surprising manifestations of contemporary art that will lodge in its exhibitions and the new " Miami Design District ", engine of change and urban regeneration of the most avant-garde city of Miami.
