Frank Gehry’s first Florida building, a big bleached box in Miami Beach, looks more like a high-end department store than an eye-catching piece of “sculpitecture” by the architect of “swoopy.” But contained in the $160-million New World Symphony music academy and performance center—on schedule to open on Jan. 25 despite some last-minute hiccups—Gehry’s signature free-form rooms stand as tall as 80 ft, visible through a 180 x 80-ft picture window.
Other than to say “we put all the juice inside,” the architect is mum on whether the music-box shape was selected for context, economy or constructibility. But Benton Delinger, director of project management for the project’s theater consultant, Theatre Projects, New York City, says the music academy has the “hallmarks of a Miami building but is still Frank Gehry.” He calls the exterior “an appropriate Miami response.”