Dali House

There was a collective uproar at the Collect Dali Yahoo Group recently after designs were published for “Placa Dali”, a new building to house the permanent collection of the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida.

In April, City Council approved the initial plans for what the St Petersburg Times called “a cascading river of glass spilling out from the centre of an unadorned, three-storey building. The glass, which the museum is calling the ‘Engima’, will serve as both entrance and skylight to the main structure, called the ‘Treasure Box’.

“The Engima will mimic the shape of a helical staircase that will spiral 28 feet from the ground floor to the museum’s main third-level gallery. Dali’s work was heavily influenced by the discovery of DNA and the double helix in the 1950s.

“Placa Dali will also include a 31,000-square-foot elevated plaza near the building’s entrance that will be used for outdoor dining and museum events.

“Already, city leaders are comparing the building’s design to the Louvre Museum in Paris.”

The Tampa Tribune quoted museum executive director Hank Hine as saying the new building would combine “skilful precision” and “dreamlike fantasy”.

Neither of those characterisations figures in the way the members of the Yahoo Group saw things. “Abysmal, hideous, ugly, wrong” was the way the outcry began and it went on for several days. There was a general call for a protest to the museum and council and even a suggested alternative design.

Join the group and you can read the discussion here.

Hurricane-proof, it’s due to open in 2010, “across from the Mahaffey Theater”, which is on 1st Street South, adjacent to Albert Whitted Airport. That suggests that someone’s house is coming down. In the Google Earth image below, you can see the locations of the Mahaffey and the Dali Museum in Poynter Park over on 3rd Street.

The St Pete’s Dali Museum appears in the Dali Planet biographyhere.