Inside walls and up stairs, Miami tried to imitate Italy? What people said about that

Nearly 40 years ago, Miami-Dade County opened a downtown cultural arts complex. It looked like Italy. Mediterranean flourishes. An open plaza. Eventually the place was home to an art museum, a history museum and the main library branch.

But you wouldn’t know about this cornucopia of culture from the street. The plaza was one floor above street level, behind walls that looked like a fort.

A few years ago, the art museum left for a bayside location. The history museum and library remain at the downtown Miami plaza.

There were high hopes for this new centerpiece to Miami’s cultural life. Now, four decades later, its future is in doubt with plans to redevelop a swath of downtown Miami.

What was the reaction when the county introduced the cultural center?

Let’s travel through the Miami Herald archives to find out. The Herald’s architecture critic at the time had some thoughts. Here is a look back at how the cultural center came to be:

A look at the plaza

Published Dec. 12, 1983

By Beth Dunlop, architecture critic

Philip Johnson, the creator, was pleased. He had donned a tuxedo just at dusk, and now he was seeing his plaza gussied up for the party as well.

Earlier that same day, a crisp-bright December day in 1982, Johnson found a place on the plaza for the Raymond Duchamp-Villon horse. Johnson tried one location, then another on the empty plaza that is being dedicated today.

But by nightfall, the Dade Cultural Center plaza was filled with people, and in the background, somewhat muffled, was a string quartet. Appropriately, the event was an architectural awards dinner, with awards going to others.

The night, however, was Johnson’s; the most famous architect in America and his yet-unacclaimed plaza were the event. It made him ebullient, even expansive.

He pronounced the plaza a great urban place, perhaps the first such in the great tradition of the Italian piazza, America’s answer to St. Mark’s Place in Venice. “This may be the first place in America where you will be able to get a decent Campari and soda,” he said.

The thought turned him giddy.

One story above the street, the cultural center plaza is reached by one of three stairways or a long colonnaded processional ramp that runs for half a block along Flagler Street.

There is the mammoth, four-story library, with its arcaded entrance, at one end. Across the plaza are the historical museum, with its three-arch entryway, and the arts center, with its squared off front porch - both architecturally more severe than the slightly flamboyant library. A fourth, smaller building that eventually may be a food concession completes the ensemble. The effect is of an imaginary village arranged around a picture- book plaza.

The architecture is borrowed; Johnson’s two primary inspirations were Italian architecture generally and Miami’s Italianate Villa Vizcaya estate particularly. But there is also a little of Addison Mizner’s Palm Beach, of Coral Gables, of Spain and even of Byzantium here as well.

Johnson wanted this plaza to be a place of memory, and it has the quality of having been there for centuries. Empty, this plaza is a place to be lonely, to walk into the surrealistic world of a Giorgio de Chirico painting, to step back in time or across continents.

But this is a place to mingle, too. Filled with a crowd, by day or by night, the cultural center plaza becomes a grand ballroom, animated and joyful.

There is almost an acre of tile here, and that is a lot of Dijon-mustard and terra-cotta colored tile. The tile, arranged decoratively in a crosshatch pattern Johnson designed, stretches almost from Flagler to First Street. On the plaza are six iron light standards, and they are lavish affairs, looking as if they had come from the streets of Seville.

But that’s it - no built-in benches or shady nooks, just plaza surrounded by pale peachy-yellow buildings. Johnson chose to let the architecture speak for itself, without adornment.

The plaza does need tables and chairs, umbrellas and balloons, food and music, even a “mouth-organ man” as Johnson has suggested on several occasions. The plaza needs people, and people need a reason to go there, then to stay a while.

For it isn’t really a piazza, in the true sense. In an Italian town the piazza is the heart, the center around which everything else has grown. The cultural-center plaza is removed from the bustle of urban life. Johnson found downtown Miami a bit bedraggled and a bit boring, so he set his plaza on a pedestal, above and away from the rest of the city.

“It’s very hard to prognosticate how the citizens of Miami are going to use it,” Johnson said. “Will it be one of those sun-drenched emptinesses, the moonlit desertions that you find even in some Italian towns?”

This plaza is like an empty banquet table, waiting for the feast. We can make of it what we will, and that is the cultural center plaza’s greatest promise.

A building for the times

Published Jan. 8, 1984

By Beth Dunlop, architecture critic

Here there is a touch of Venice, there a glimpse of Verona. But fantasy is fleeting in Philip Johnson’s Metro-Dade Cultural Center, a modern-Mediterranean structure that stretches back across the centuries for its origins.

The inspirations here range from the Renaissance to the Roman Empire. The rooftops - at least those in immediate view - are of terra-cotta barrel tile, and are timeless; the main entrance is a colonnaded processional walkway bordered on one side with royal palm trees and on the other with a series of shallow reflecting pools. The walls are a pale peachy-yellow stucco; the trim is shellstone from Texas, an ancient fossilized rock that is kin to Florida’s native keystone.

But even considering all this, the Cultural Center is a building of our times. It is sparse, rather than sumptuous, lacking in lavish building materials. It is, in places, shy of craftsmanship; the fine finishes and careful touches are missing here and there. It is so security-conscious it might be a fortress on a hill.

Outside, the stone walls, angled like the battered walls of a medieval bulwark, stand sentinel against the city. They extend three-fourths of the way around the building - along part of the center’s Flagler Street facade, down NW Second Avenue, beside the Metrorail tracks in the shadow of the old Dade County Courthouse and on NW First Street facing the new Metro Administration Building. These walls are stern, even somewhat ominous.

The three buildings of the Cultural Center - the Center for the Fine Arts, the Main Library and the Historical Museum of Southern Florida - don’t open onto the street. They are arranged around a vast tile plaza, one story up.

By nature, libraries and museums are introspective buildings, but these are especially so. The essential statement here is that this Cultural Center is an escape from the city, a place of erudition or of reflection or even of celebration, but one apart from the mundane workaday world.

The plaza is reached only by stairways or the magical colonnaded walkway that ascends to the plaza paralleling Flagler Street. Of all the elements of this Cultural Center, the plaza and the colonnaded ramp entrance are Johnson’s crowning achievements.

The walkway is wonderful, a dramatic approach with arched openings looking out on palm trees on one side and shallow flowing basins of water on the other. It is a slow slope, making the transition from the commotion of the city to the isolation of the plaza a reverie, not a chore.

And with its herringbone-patterned tile, in mustard-beige and terra cotta, this plaza is a glamorous public space, and that alone is an accomplishment in a city of often-lost glamor and misplaced aspirations. It is dreamlike, almost surreal, at once barren and grand, capable of being either solitary or festive.

On the plaza, it is as if the centuries had been telescoped. And yet, reality intrudes on this plaza, sometimes rather harshly. There is considerable beauty here, but it is a beauty that resists close examination, because then it diminishes.

Stuck awkwardly onto an archway at the entrance to the new Main Library is a surveillance camera, a rude reminder of the times. The surveillance cameras are white metal, not even painted to match the pastel yellow of the center’s stucco walls. Then, too, there are chrome-and- blue pay telephones, off-the-shelf items, tacked onto the catering shed on the plaza - and the copper water spigot that awkwardly spews into the shallow water basin right at the plaza’s main entrance. The black iron lanterns hung inside the colonnades of the library and the history museum are held firmly in place by rough metal-cable stays.

All of this shows a peculiar, clumsy inattendance to detail, facts obtruding on the fiction. If the fantasy were complete, the surveillance cameras and the phone booths and the plumbing and lighting defects would be at least out of sight - here.

But worst of all is the huge ventilating shaft - part of the $16-million replacement smoke evacuation system added after-the- fact to this $25 million building. This ventilating shaft has destroyed the proportions of the sculpture garden that sits between the Center for the Fine Arts and the historical museum.

The smoke evacuation system has provided the worst chapter in this building’s history. Initially designed, and then installed, wrongly, this fire-protection system has caused almost a year’s delay in the opening of the Cultural Center, and speaking only in terms of architectural esthetics, has done some serious damage.

That damage hasn’t been completely assessed. Two of the Cultural Center’s three buildings - the historical museum and the library - aren’t finished inside. The historical museum may open in March; the library won’t open until much later, early 1985.

Inside the fine arts center, the replacement smoke evacuation system caused some architectural harm. One wall had to be pushed forward to accommodate a giant air intake vent, and that wall is now unusable. Further, the symmetry, and thereby some of the beauty, of the second-floor gallery has been impaired.

The Center for the Fine Arts is a quite simple building. There are two gallery floors, and below, at street level, are offices and storage. At the plaza entrance is the lobby, with a gift shop off to one side and an auditorium off to the other.

The 16,000 feet of gallery space - neither an exorbitant nor miserly amount - is really rather unmemorable, neutral exhibition space that won’t fight with the art but doesn’t enhance it either. Because there is no permanent collection, the gallery space had to be impartial architecture, left to the exhibition designer to evoke feelings of intimacy or awe.

The gallery is punctured by a stairway, and the stairway is pragmatic rather than grand. There is little else here: On the plaza level, arched double doors lead out to the sculpture garden, and upstairs there is a single arched window.

That window, the only natural light in the art center, was a concession of Johnson’s, but it is a failed concession; it comes off as an affectation. So, too, does the single false porthole window on the outside of the art center, the only other decoration on this otherwise quite plain, sturdy building. It has none of the exaltedness, none of the self-proclamation that many museums have. With its squared-off one-story portico, the Center for the Fine Arts has a certain quaintness, an unprepossessing quality that makes it seem a vernacular Spanish or Italian town building.

The historical museum is a building almost as plain but bigger, with a rather expansive blank wall that forms a backdrop for the sculpture garden. It is a barn of a building, a Romanesque basilica stripped down and then stripped again. If it stood alone it might be quite oppressive. As it is, as part of an arrangement of buildings, it fits in rather well - framing the plaza without overwhelming it.

The entrance to the historical museum, through three arches, is distinguished by the styling of the columns, the most obscure detail of the whole complex; they were adapted by Johnson from the time of the Roman Empire, but they are his invention, not a specific allusion.

The library sits on the plaza like a giant Palladian villa. Its proportions are stolid and classical, with an arcade running around three sides. The entrance is marked mainly by three arched second-story windows, placed over the doorway in the center of the library’s plaza facade. All of the arched windows are dark, with dark metal sunburst tops. The three windows over the library entrance also have curved wrought iron balconies, in a fancy pattern repeated throughout the center, one created by Johnson.

Inside the library, there are arches and arches - real arches, false arches, so many of them that it seems to be a trick played with mirrors sometimes. And to further evoke the sense of mirage, Johnson chose illusory pastel colors -- pale gray, lavender, apricot, cream - to paint the walls, with all their false arches.

Johnson is a genius and a wit; he is so good at what he does that he can do it effortlessly, or so it seems. This building embodies some of the best of his talents - the glorious space on the plaza, for example - but it has its lesser moments, too. Where the Cultural Center is an earnest effort, it is good; where it is glib, it is not.

When Johnson began this building in 1978, he and his partner, John Burgee, had not yet completed their design for the AT&T Building in New York, with its Chippendale top and Renaissance base. He had not created the faceted crystalline spires of Pittsburgh Plate Glass’s towering glass-Gothic headquarters nor the soaring stone pinnacles of Republicbank in Houston.

So in that respect, the Cultural Center is a transitional building, the building in which Johnson/Burgee moved from abstraction into allusion. The design process was a peculiar one, because Johnson looked over South Florida’s architectural offerings, settled in on the buildings he most admired - Vizcaya in particular and the works of Addison Mizner in general - and then emulated the way in which they were designed, more than the style in which they were designed. He went to the history books and borrowed, just as Addison Mizner did: lavishly and interpretively, choosing to re-create some of his favorite architectural episodes and to invent others.

The plaza itself is Roman, basically. The window arrangements are of the Renaissance, mostly. The colonnades are Palladian, perhaps, though the balconies and the plaza light fixtures - highly sentimental wrought-iron affairs - are of Spanish derivation.

The light standards, though overly romantic, are charmingly overstated, rather than offensive. They are sentimental baubles, and actually, the plaza might look better with more than the six that have been installed. That is not the case with all the wrought iron; it is ubiquitous — inside and outside of buildings, marking the sculpture court, blocking the stairs — and it is garish, with all its elaborate curlicues.

This garish wrought iron is used as gates at the bottom of all four entrances to the Cultural Center -- three stairways and the ramped walkway. More forboding are the medieval, heavy steel grates covering windows along the street, where there are windows. The grates simply make the Cultural Center look more prisonlike, and the relationship of building to street is already an inimicable one.

Johnson, acting under the dictates of Dade County’s initial Government Center Plan, turned the building away from the city, and he did so to an extent that the sidewalk suffers - except on Flagler Street in front of the colonnade where two rows of royal palms have been planted.

The west side of the building, along NW First Avenue, is entirely bleak and the east side of the the building is uncomfortably close to the Metrorail tracks. Along NW First Street, pedestrians will walk past mechanical vents. It is simply not a building to walk around: Two skywalks will cross right up to the plaza level from the new Metro Administration Building or from the County Service Center, which includes a parking garage.

This kind of loosely historic architecture - be it Mediterranean or Palladian or Spanish or Italian — requires evocative building materials and intricate architectural details that tell a story. In the Cultural Center, the building materials look and feel new, not rich and weathered.

The stucco is patchy and blotchy, but not so that it looks ancient; the building will have to be painted eventually. The barrel tile serves a decorative purpose more than a functional one; the tops of the buildings are all gravel. The stairs are unpainted concrete and topped with a dark — and sinfully ugly — gray sandpaper-like, nonskid surface. Inside walls are wallboard, mainly, and they are simply less substantial than plaster would be. All this notwithstanding, the Cultural Center is an absorbing building: It preoccupies because it is at once so accomplished and so flawed. It fascinates because it is at once literal and interpretative, historical and modern. It is a building that is mostly sincere but occasionally facetious, largely exhilarating but also a bit maddening.

Still, walking up the processional ramp past the reflecting pools or standing on the plaza, transported, its faults are forgiven, and it all seems pretty fabulous. The Cultural Center is an important building for the ideas it poses about the potential of Mediterranean architecture in modern times, but its intellectual offerings will always pale before its romantic possibilities.

Arches for a classic library

Published July 19, 1985

By Beth Dunlop, architecture critic

At noon today, with considerable fanfare, Dade County’s new $14.1 million main library will open its arched doorways onto the vast tile plaza of the Metro-Dade Cultural Center.

It is the centerpiece of the county’s 25-library system, and it is its showpiece — a formal, almost ceremonial building with grand proportions and a demure demeanor. It has its moments of architectural brilliance and a few considerable flaws. Mostly, it is marvelous.

As libraries go, it is a classic. It is conservative rather than innovative in design. There is no doubt that this is a library.

In it are more than 700,000 volumes, including separate collections for children and young adults and the library’s superb Florida Collection of books, documents and memorabilia. With 210,000 square feet of space, it eventually is to hold 1.5 million books.

The entire Cultural Center complex was designed by world- famous New York architect Philip Johnson, 79, and was the first of his firm’s “postmodern” works, with an architectural style hearkening back to the past.

So this colonnaded library presides over the Cultural Center like a giant Italian palazzo, rising three stories above the plaza’s expanse. It is an essay in pale lavender and apricot, with pastel paint and paper adorning virtually every wall and all the arches.

Arches abound, inside and outside, on windows and walls, walkways and halls. There are open arches and closed arches, false arches and real arches, whole arches and half arches.

The arches give this rather voluminous building a cadence, and they provide it with a sense of warmth, even intimacy, that it otherwise might lack.

he pastels are the colors of a sunset just as the rain is clearing — particularly apt and at once soothing and evocative. These are not typical library colors, but they seem to belong to this library, almost as if no other colors would do. That is a particular genius of Philip Johnson’s — to make parts of a building look as if there were no possible alternative.

The oak, tweed and brass furnishings are perfectly neutral, neither offensive nor inspirational. There are tables and chairs for reading, but no carrells or quiet corners. The place looks like a cloistered center of serious study, but the spaces are wide open rather than contemplative.

hen too, the rectangular windows punched into the centers of arches on the library’s second floor look foolish, as if they were an architectural afterthought.

ven worse is the flat-topped rotunda that forms the library’s entry hall. Rotundas are meant to have domes, and this one doesn’t. It rises two stories to a perfectly flat ceiling, a frustration at best. It is architectural cheap shot to design an elegant space like this and then let it end in flatness.

The public art piece by Los Angeles painter Ed Ruscha that was chosen for the library saves the beheaded rotunda in what can only be described as a triumph of art over architecture.

Ruscha chose to adorn a circular ring in the main lobby with a mural containing a quote from Hamlet, “Words without thought never to heaven go.” The words are set against a panorama of colors, some of them evoking South Florida sunsets, and they are utterly riveting — enough that the truncated rotunda ceases to be a bother. The art doesn’t fit at all with the architecture, which makes it even better in this case.

Right under the Ruscha sits the main information desk, an imposing, semicircular piece of furniture built into the floor. It’s certainly a logical place for it, but the desk is too tall and long, making it both a visual and physical barrier, a rude intrusion.

You should be able to walk through the arched doors into the lobby and look through three more sets of arches, but you look at a piece of furniture instead of enjoying a rhythmic architectural sequence. Esthetics aside, you should be able to walk into the library and see rooms of books, not a barricade.

So this is not a perfect building, but it’s a pretty good one — and for the most part a pretty one. It’s not often that any building conjures up the sunset for us at midday, or gives us a fleeting trip to Italy on our way to check out a mystery novel.

Gambling on culture

Published April 24, 1983

By Michael Browning

The $26 million Metro-Dade Cultural Center opens Monday. Its historical museum is closed until July. Its art gallery is closed until October. Its library is closed until next spring.

In fact, outside of the lobby, there is only one room in the whole complex that is actually opening: the auditorium in the Center for the Fine Arts. And inside the auditorium there is only one work of art on display: James Rosenquist’s huge controversial mural, Star Thief, the famous “flying bacon” painting that made Eastern Airlines President Frank Borman sizzle when he saw a 4-by-5 inch transparency of it nearly two years ago.

It is a spectacular artwork, big as a billboard, brilliantly executed and exploding with images of technology: multicolored wires, a bolt, a great ball bearing, gleaming metal and an electric grid. It is an eyeful.

It has to be. For the moment, Star Thief is the sum total of culture at the Dade Cultural Center. Everything revolves around Rosenquist, a slender, pleasant man who is going bald in front and who talks about painting as if it were a scary crapshoot, snapping his fingers and rolling invisible dice.

But this is more than Rosenquist’s gamble. With his one painting, in this one room, the whole Dade Cultural Center begins: a lordly complex of white, Mediterranean-style buildings clustered around an elevated piazza that is meant to serve as a lodestar for the arts in Miami.

It is beginning with lost revenue, scrapped exhibitions and bad blood between the county and the complex’s designers. Monday’s opening hung on the word of a Dade County fire marshal who visited the auditorium only last Thursday and certified it safe. The 16,000-square-foot gallery won’t be ready until July at the earliest, a delay of three months.

While visitors quietly contemplate Star Thief, workmen in the gallery will be furiously executing “Change Order 13,” pouring concrete into floor vents that didn’t work and knocking holes in the gallery ceiling to install new ones. These last- minute modifications will cost from $1.5 to $2 million. They are, in the words of County Manager Merrett Stierheim, “expensive and extensive.”

And so Miami’s newest art gallery opens, without a gallery.

“We’re not taking the easy way out,” said Center spokesman Brenda Williamson. “With this exhibition we are fiercely determined to salvage what we can.”

“We decided half a loaf was better than none. We’ve had postponement after postponement. Now we’ve got to do something,” said Center Director Jan van der Marck.

The story of the center’s faulty smoke evacuation system reminds one of the horseshoe nail that cost a kingdom. Back in October 1982 the county conducted a “substantial completion” inspection of the all-but-finished complex. A 94-page list of relatively minor items that still had to be finished was handed to the project’s contractor. On the list was the smoke evacuation system.

The system was a newfangled affair, made necessary by the project’s Mediterranean design, which called for massive walls and few windows. In case of a fire, smoke would be drawn off by fans through vents in the floor.

To this day spokesmen for the complex’s designers, Joint Venture, which includes the New York firm of Johnson/Burgee and the Miami firm of Connell, Metcalf and Eddy, will not say whose idea it was to put the vents in the floor instead of in the ceiling. County officials are maintaining the same pained silence.

“I would rather not say,” said county architect Scott Parsons. “I understand the man is no longer with the firm.”

The floor vents didn’t work during a test in November 1982. They didn’t work again during a test in January 1983. The reason, Parsons said, was simple.

“Smoke goes up,” he observed.

As a result at least five exhibitions have gone up in smoke, at a cost of perhaps $100,000. Among them, ironically, was a show of architectural works by Johnson/Burgee, the firm that helped design the place. One whole design show, “Italian Re-Evolution” is sitting in crates in a warehouse in Hialeah. It will not be uncrated. It will be returned, unshown, unseen.

“We will have to just swallow it,” said van der Marck. “How do you say it? We took a bath.”

The lost money was private, not public. It was supplied by foundations and individual donations. But the loss is still galling, both to the center’s staff and to the county.

“When you take into account the costs of paying a staff, maintaining security and keeping the place open, it could run as high as $1 million. This doesn’t take into account the intangible losses, the loss of prestige in canceling a show,” said Assistant County Manager Connie Jones. “This may also affect our ability to raise money in the future.”

“Some of these shows were actually advertised nationwide in museum magazines,” said Williamson. “There is a sense of keen disappointment. We have really suffered a major inconvenience.”

The $1.5 to $2 million to modify the smoke exhaust system will be borne by Joint Venture, though it is not yet decided how the burden will be split up between the two firms’ insurance companies. The county may also seek to make the designers pay the estimated $1 million bill for lost time, Jones said.

The annual budget for the Center for the Fine Arts may top $700,000, but it is hoped that the place will generate as much as $250,000 of its own revenue to offset this. Eventually county officials hope the center will be self-supporting.

Auditorium visitors can see Star Thief (through June 12) and an exhibit of Matisse prints (June 9 through July 24) for free. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Center officials view the missed spring and summer exhibitions as a setback, not a disaster. These no-shows should not hinder the center’s first big exhibition, “In Quest of Excellence,” which is still scheduled to open on Oct. 28.

This, van der Marck hopes, will be the center’s shining hour, a dazzling display of over 200 paintings by Cezanne, Hobbema, van Dyck, Monet, Rousseau, Matisse, Seurat, Picasso and others. Nothing like it has ever been seen in Miami.

And despite its initial faltering, nothing like the Dade Cultural Center has ever been seen in Miami either. Behind the duct tape that cordons off the staircases, the crunched rubble of construction and the damp smell of newly poured concrete, lies an extraordinary attempt to rescue an entire square block of W. Flagler St. in the city’s teetering downtown.

Architect Johnson calls it a “sequestered acropolis,” and he plainly meant it as a kind of bright fastness, a place where cars can’t climb and traffic lights can’t be seen, but where people can rise and be refreshed.

At the top of the stairs is the plaza.

Even though the $235,000 sculpture by Raymond du Champ- Villon isn’t yet in place, even though the seven-stepped black granite fountain isn’t working yet, even though the landscaping hasn’t been done yet, the spacious square is still impressive.

It is 14 feet above street level and is remarkably quiet even at the five o’clock rush hour. It is perhaps best seen late in the day, deserted, with the whiteness of the surrounding buildings muted in the fading light and the tesselated pavement shining under a fine mist of rain.

At such a moment it seems not a carefully designed whole, but a pleasant family of buildings that were put here at various times, by happy chance. It possesses the inviting human scale of an Italian town square and, for center director van der Marck, the frail shimmer of a dream.

“I like to say that stepping into the plaza is like stepping into a Giorgio de Chirico painting. De Chirico is a metaphysical architectural painter who transports you into a dream world,” he said.

“In that sense, the center is an ideal place, in which one can forget for a short while the problems of the real world.”