Construction is well underway for a new 250,000-square-foot science museum in Miami, the next big anchor in a waterfront park project that took more than a decade to come to fruition.
When it opens in 2016, the new Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, which broke ground in 2012, will join the one-year-old Pérez Art Museum Miami, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, in the city’s newly remade and renamed Museum Park. After 14 years of planning, the park that opened in June is a simpler and cheaper version of the original Cooper, Robertson & Partners design, according to the Miami Herald.
The Frost Museum of Science is currently located near the Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, roughly 3 miles as the crow flies from the under-construction museum designed by New York’s Grimshaw and local firm Rodriguez and Quiroga Architects Chartered. Gillian Thomas, the museum’s CEO and president, took ARCHITECT on a hard-hat tour of the site earlier this month.
The museum design includes a 500,000-gallon aquarium tank that will be visible from the roof and sides, as well as from a 30-foot tilted window at the base of the tank. The 250-seat planetarium on the Biscayne Boulevard side will feature projections on the outside. The museum anticipates more than 700,000 visitors each year.
Visit ARCHITECT’s Project Gallery for more renderings of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, as well as other projects by Grimshaw.
