NSU ART MUSEUM

GLAVOVIC STUDIO worked closely with the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale over seven years to upgrade and reorient the museum. The range of projects included modifying the lobby, adding a café, renovating the museum bathrooms, reenvisioning the entrance, adding a monumental stair, and an art commission, Threshold.

To forge a new and vibrant connection between the museum’s original Edward Larrabee Barnes building and the downtown Las Olas District, a series of insertions and upgrades reinforce the mission of the Museum as the leading arts Institution in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

Bridge_Stair, a monumental sculpture affords visitors a view of the New River. The two story steel and polycarbonate panel sculpture was conceived as a viewing platform and shadow play on the existing museum exterior walls. The project arose out of the immediate program necessity for an entrance stair to the second level terrace for the King Tutankhamen exhibit in 2006. The urban and architectural strategy for the stair/sculpture was to reinforce the primary role of a downtown museum, creating a vibrant public plaza and supporting the existing building entry sequence. Movement, landscape, and form are celebrated in this intervention as people occupying the stair cast shadows and animate the museum’s exterior walls. Threshold is large scale site specific artwork conceptualizing water and surface, inscription and materiality through the lens of Florida’s natural environments.

Sited on Las Olas Boulevard, the installation reinforces the urban edge and thoughtfully resolves accessibility through a sandblasted ground plane drawing/bench and eco resin photo montage/railing floating above a blue 7’ x 44’ glowing glass box. Additional native grasses planted around the work provide a slower and softer transition between the city’s sidewalk and the Museum’s Plaza . Interior renovations including the design of a new lobby coupled as a café service bar and a reconfiguring of the gift store. A visitor favorite are the renovated museum bathrooms. Photography by Robin Hill.