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MIAMI, Fla. (Nov. 15, 2002) - Florida
International University is pleased to announce that, after 10
years of planning and a 2-year search, it has chosen Yann Weymouth,
AIA, design director of Hellmuth Obata + Kassabaum (HOK), as architect
for the new Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum.
The museum is being named for Patricia and Phillip
Frost for their longstanding support of the FIU Art Museum and
for their leadership in raising funds for this project. The Frosts
contributed the naming gift and have been key in attracting other
donors. Other major contributors include B Landon Carlin, Dorothea
and Steven Green, Betty Laird Perry, Francien Ruwitch, Amancio
Suarez, and Carol and Norman Weldon.
The Frost Museum will encompass 40,000-square feet
at a total construction cost of $11 million. It will be built
on a spectacular lakeside site on the “Avenue of the Arts,”
a mall that will connect the Museum, the Wertheim Performing Arts
Center and the Management and Advanced Research Center (MARC)
on the University Park campus. The Museum will house FIU’s
permanent art collection, its program of temporary exhibitions
and lectures, art scholarship and conservation. A soaring glass
entrance atrium will lead to a café and museum shop, destined
to become a new hub for campus cultural life.
Weymouth is internationally renowned for his work
on museums. He was honored by President Francois Mitterand of
France for his role as chief of design for I.M. Pei for the Grand
Louvre project in Paris. He previously served as Pei’s design
chief for the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington,
D.C. He was the founding partner of RedRoof Design in New York
City, a pioneering modern architectural firm. Weymouth’s
current projects include three new buildings
for the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, and the Uris Educational
Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Founded in 1955, HOK is a global
architectural firm specializing in planning, design and delivery
solutions. Through its collaborative network of 24 offices worldwide,
the firm serves diverse clients around the world. HOK has a distinguished
record of museum work, including more than 90 different museum
and exhibition projects, among them the Udvar-Hazy Center for
the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, the Japanese-American
Museum in Los Angeles, and the George H. Bush Presidential Library
and Museum, in College Station, Texas.
The Art Museum at FIU currently
occupies 2,800 square feet on the ground floor of the Charles
E. Perry Building on FIU’s University Park Campus. It is
accredited by the American Association of Museums (AAM) and is
an affiliate of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.. Its ongoing
programs include the Steven and Dorothea Green Critics Lecture
Series, which has brought such renowned critics as Pierre Rosenberg,
Robert Farris Thompson and Julia Platt Herzberg to FIU-University
Park. It also is home to the Martin Z. Margulies Outdoor Sculpture
Park, a 69-work collection distributed across FIU-University Park.
It is recognized as one of the world’s most important sculpture
collections and the largest on a university campus. It includes
major pieces by Dubuffet, Miro, Nevelson, Noguchi and Serra.
The Art Museum is open Monday,
Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Wednesday, 10
a.m. to 9 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. The Martin
Z. Margulies Outdoor Sculpture Park is open to the public 24 hours
a day. Admissions and all events at The Art Museum are free of
charge.
High-resolution images of Weymouth and Frost Museum rendering
are available at http://news.fiu.edu/
on the “NEWS PHOTOS” link.
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