It's about time to check in on the fate of the Tampa Museum of Art and Dan Kiley Park, two cultural neighbors whose fates were hanging in the balance when the Weekly Planet reported on them last.
Their current status: Still hanging. Kiley Park is looking a little neater and has "Friends" who are working to save it. Viñoly is busy working on museums in every other city in the world, but alas, not in Tampa. The Tampa Museum of Art is doing quite well in its 25-year-old home. They've managed to fill the museum with good exhibitions, double attendance figures (compared to October of 2004) and continue their educational outreach programs, despite losing key members of their staff.
Then, last week, the fate of the itinerant art museum and its vulnerable neighbor Kiley Park was in the news again. The Tampa Tribune reported that the museum board and city officials had "embraced" a site on the Hillsborough River, adjacent to Kiley Park. The favored site included the cubes and two floors of the cylindrical building now known as Rivergate Tower, as well as a new building to be built on the plaza north of the cubes.
The story turned out to be premature. The site fact-finding committee had not arrived at a list of sites to present to the museum's board of directors for consideration. While some board members had expressed favorable interest in looking at the Rivergate site, others had not even been made aware of the possibility.
The site-selection committee was formed in August after the Federal Courthouse site was rejected. The committee includes Ken Rollins, interim executive director of the museum; Christine Burdick, president of the Tampa Downtown Partnership; Hal Flowers, museum trustee and chairman of the museum's building committee; Mark Huey, City of Tampa economic development administrator; and Ray Chiaramonte of The Planning Commission.
Asked about the timing of the story, Iorio said, "I made it clear that I would leave the site selection to the committee, to do fact-finding, then let me know how I could help. The site-selection group said this is the best choice, depending on negotiations with ACP." (ACP is America's Capital Partners, the building owners.)
Burdick carefully chose her words, "Those museum board members who have voiced an opinion have been favorable about this site."
Rollins was equally cautious, calling it "one of the more favorable sites." But, he advised, "When the committee is prepared to make a final report, the sites we are considering will be presented to the museum board." He described the board of trustees' reaction to the site as one of "cautious optimism."
The good news is that the museum and the mayor have found at least one site that they are willing to even talk about.
The bad news … let's not go there yet. The negatives will be abundantly clear once the committee and museum staff have studied the architectural, functional, financial and other feasibility requirements for installing an art museum there. It might be a time-saver if they talked to some of the other shoppers who have considered moving to the site but decided against it: the University of South Florida's Contemporary Art Museum, USF's architecture department, and even former Tampa Museum of Art staff. (Yes, the notion of moving the museum to the cubes has been considered before.) There are many positives I would prefer to mention. The tower, no matter how Tampa loves to hate it, is the city's definitive piece of modern architecture. And comparisons to the dead-on-arrival Federal Courthouse option are not fair, in that there is space for expansion near this site and the building is in excellent condition and in a prime location.
The architect of the buildings, Harry Wolf, is alive and well and had this to say about sharing the site with the museum: "Utilizing the cubes as civic spaces is in line with the original conception. These are special spaces for collective activity." He envisioned indoor sculpture galleries and outdoor sculpture in the park, shops and cafes in the light-filled cubes. Wolf felt that the buildings and Kiley Park's integrity could be enhanced if done in the right way.
"There is great potential. Yet while you may have wonderful ingredients, you still need a good chef."
Which leads me to a caution. The Dan Kiley Park has been issued a reprieve but could be threatened by a plan that is not respectful of its importance. Planting a new building on the plaza — what used to be a major feature of the park — has to be seriously weighed and, if decided upon, designed by the right architect. Altering the park's plantings to accommodate large sculpture would be another risky endeavor. Wolf should be involved, at the very least consulted, before any more changes to Kiley Park occur. We are in danger of pitting three of Tampa's cultural assets — Wolf's buildings, Kiley's Park and the Tampa Museum of Art — against each other.
Speaking of architects, remember Skidmore, Owings and Merrill? The Frank E. Duckwall Foundation donated $235,000 for that world-renowned architectural firm's 2002 master plan for a downtown cultural arts district. SOM drew an expanse of green in the place where Mayor Iorio now envisions a downtown park. The main cultural attraction was a new art museum, to be placed adjacent to Kiley Park (perpendicular to the site of the current building) but not on top of it. It was a little wedge, much smaller than the ensuing Viñoly footprint, but bigger than the museum's current space and with room for later expansion.
After the courthouse feasibility study last year, the city-appointed study group recommended building a new museum in virtually the same space as SOM had recommended. At the public presentation, this was a nearly unanimous favorite.
The mayor has stated that she intends for all of that space to be green space. She has presented Thomas Balsley and Associates as landscape architects for the park. When asked if she would rule out considering residential development on the site where SOM had placed the museum, she repeated her commitment to green space and said, "It will be up to Balsley how he deals with the edge of the park."
So we have wonderful ingredients, but perhaps too many chefs.
I remain cautiously optimistic. I still want Tampa to have a little slice of art-museum pie right where the great architects and interested public wanted it.
This article appears in Nov 23-29, 2005.