The Ball Chair In Miniature!

A Hundred Years - A Hundred Chairs. Masterworks from the Vitra Design Museum is the current exhibition through September 16th at the Tampa Museum of Art. It's a large collection of chairs arranged on steel and glass shelves but is much more interesting than you might imagine. It's really very cool. There are chairs you will instantly recognize and others you’ll be very glad you never had to sit on as a child (as punishment). Plastic, wood, metal, leather and lots of great plastic creations.

There are displays featuring drawings, sketches, ads and brochures that help educate and guide you through the interesting history. All of them are on loan from the Vitra Design Museum located in Weil am Rhein, Germany (to visit Vitra click HERE). The museum holds the estates of designers like Charles and Ray Eames, and the main building was designed by architect Frank Gehry. Some of the chairs look pretty dull when compared to Gehry’s design for the building that houses them. The exhibition is well worth seeing. For more info click HERE.

The chair you see above is very small. It measures roughly 8-inches top to bottom but is an exact copy of the famous Eero Aarnio's Ball Chair design of 1965. It's so emblematic of the culture of the 1960s and yet very few people actually owned one. Cocoon-like and extremely comfortable, it's a shiny plastic sphere with cozy cushioning covering the entire inside. (Very 2001 Space Odyssey.) This 1/6 miniature (costing about $355) is available from the museum gift shop.



NEW Tampa Museum of Art Opens

The new 66,000 square foot Tampa Museum of Art, on the left, opened today with a public grand opening opening ceremony and about 2,000 guests. It is a spectacular building designed by architect Stanley Saitowitz from San Francisco, CA. On the right is the soon to open Glazer Children's Museum. Both front the just completed Curtis Hixon Park on the Hillsborough River. My daughter, Kris, who is an accomplished photographer, took the photo.

Railroad bridge or work of great modern art?

The Cass Street Bridge, 500 feet in length and built in 1926 at a cost of $400,000, was added as a river crossing to relieve some traffic on the Lafayette, later named, Kennedy Street Bridge. It connected Tampa’s main downtown with West Tampa. It is closed for 8-months for structural repairs and should reopen in October. (After state inspection it was found to be “structurally deficient.”) The railroad bridge, which is shown in the open position, sits beside the Cass Street Bridge; it was constructed in 1915. The bridge allowed railcars to travel south from Tampa’s downtown area, across the Hillsborough River, to Port Tampa. The street and bridge were named for General Lewis Cass. As interesting as a railroad bridge may be, the man who the street was named for is far more interesting if you love history. Until I took this shot I had no idea who Cass was. Born in 1782, during our struggle for independence from England, Cass served as a military officer, governor of the Michigan territory, United States Senator representing the state of Michigan, Secretary of War under President Andrew Jackson, and Ambassador to France. My guess is the street was named for him because of his post as secretary of war and the Indian Removal policy that was a major issue at that time. He ran for president on the Democrat party ticket in 1848, but lost the election to Zachary Taylor. From 1857 until 1860, when Abraham Lincoln won the presidency, he served as Secretary of State under President James Buchanan. He died in 1866.

The bridge, named for such an accomplished politician and statesman, has acquired a brilliant, unusual and un-statesmanlike patina. I think much of the color and decoration has been added over the years by our illustrious university and college crew teams who row up and down this stretch of the river in their skulls. I featured the Laurel Street Bridge on June 23 that showcased some of their wild and extremely colorful and creative crew art. The Laurel Street and Cass Street Bridges, and this railroad bridge, are all listed as Historic Bridges of the United States.

This bridge is called the ACL Bridge because it was built to carry the trains of the Atlantic Coastline Railroad. For bridge engineering fans out there, it is a “truss bascule” design; as we less educated should know, that refers to the large, weighted portion raised up on the right side (that looks to be a very large canvas and amazing work of modern art.) These giant weights act as a counterweight to the bridge span and continuously balance it as it is raised to allow boats to go through. (Bascule is French for seesaw and balance.) According to the bridge design sites, this is the most common type of movable bridge. The Laurel Street Bridge, just up the river from Cass Street, is also a bascule design.

If any of you are movie fans, and are real good at your trivia, the 2004 movie “The Punisher” was filmed in Tampa. It starred John Travolta, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Roy Scheider and Thomas Jane as the Punisher. Part of the car chase scenes were filmed on the Cass Street Bridge.

As construction of the new Tampa Museum of Art nears completion, it’s fitting that a modern masterpiece – the sides of the counterweights for the bridge - might be within a few yards of the blank exhibit walls of the new museum. I wonder if they have contemplated featuring them in a show. It could be quite a blockbuster. (Or at least it would certainly be talked about.)

It's Not Just a Bunch of Big Black Boxes Down by the Riverfront: The NEW Tampa Museum of Art

If you look at the photo, there would be no way you'd guess what you're looking at. Yes, big tall office buildings against the sky. But what is the black thing in the foreground. Well, it's our new art museum that is currently under construction. In 2006, the architect Stanley Saitowitz from San Francisco, CA, was selected to design a new Tampa Museum of Art. It is now well out of the ground and making a strong statement in downtown Tampa's Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park. It's scheduled to open early next year. The original Tampa Museum of Art, which opened in 1979, sat behind Curtis Hixon Hall, Tampa's convention center, on the Hillsborough River. The building was razed in February last year and is being replaced by this 66,000-square-foot facility. These photographs show it from two angles as it rises up on its Hillsborough River-front location. The round limestone building above right, is the Rivergate Tower and headquarters to the Sykes Corporation. The other office buildings visible from left to right are the SunTrust, Verizon, Colonial Bank and Bank of America. The round building was designed by architect Harry Wolf to symbolize a lighthouse and is a distinctive element on our city's skyline. It's probably one of Tampa's most important buildings architecturally. The new art museum is certainly another interesting and unusual design that came about after a long and at times contentious debate and selection process that resulted in this final design by San Francisco architect Stanley Saitowitz. The exterior is being covered in pierced aluminum. . You are able to see the construction progress on the TMA WEBCAM. From the WEBCAM view, which faces to the north, the museum is on the left closest to the river and the Glazer Children's Museum, which is also under construction, is on the right. The museum will feature five interior galleries, one exterior sculpture gallery, and an educational classroom. The architect, Stanley Saitowitz, is a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and a principal of Natoma Architects Inc. in San Francisco. He is the recipient of number of awards. His completed projects include the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston, the Capp Street Artist Workshop, the San Francisco Embarcadero Promenade, the Coffee Pavilion at Stanford University, the Oxbow Art School in Napa, and several residences. He has taught at a number of schools and has lectured extensively in the USA, and abroad.

His design is tough to visualize from a photograph but it is definitely taking more of it final form as the exterior is being covered. The angle I shot from at the corner closest to the river showing tall downtown buildings rising up behind it obviously provides a stark, but intended contrast. The smaller shot from the opposite bank for the river shows the full width and relationship to the Hillsborough River. As its construction moves along I will update you on its progress and show more architectural details as they are applied.