Pérez Art Museum Miami: The Latest Architecture and News

A new video by architectural photographer Robin Hill and Chris Correa invites viewers to explore Herzog & De Meuron's Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). Interspersed with shots of the building in use, the video features interviews with Terry Riley (architect and former MOMA curator of architecture) and Tobias Ostrander (Chief Curator of PAMM). Recognized and lauded for its finesse and natural assimilation of many architectural vocabularies, the PAMM is presented here as an exemplar of cultural architecture everywhere.

Rio de Janeiro-based writer Robert Landon has shared with us his experience exploring Herzog and de Meuron's Perez Art Museum Miami.

I am standing with Christine Binswanger, senior partner of Herzog & de Meuron, a few hours before the Perez Art Museum Miami opens it doors to the public for the first time. All around us, construction workers are making last minute adjustments, while troublesome clusters of VIPs take their first peak into the museum's airy, austere galleries. The excitement is palpable.

And yet I can't unpeel my eyes from the huge, hurricane-proof window before us. They offer enormous views of resplendent Biscayne Bay and the six-lane, 5.6km Macarthur Causeway that crosses it. Throbbing with traffic, the causeway is the kind of thing that, I imagine, people come to museums to forget. So I ask Binswanger, the museum's project architect, how her team approached this design problem.

"Problem? What problem?" says Binswanger. "That is what Miami is about. Anyway, I find it beautiful. Don't you?"

Suddenly I do. Or at least I find beautiful the building's wide-open embrace of Miami, causeways and all. And I suspect that this visual (and programmatic) permeability to the city's realities—natural and manmade—will define PAMM's institutional success.