Dali Museum in Florida Incorporates Sustainable Features, Doubles Attendance Since Re-opening New Building

ORIGINAL: GreenBuilding

By Brock Haroldson, ConnectPress Editor

HOK/Moris Moreno

The new Salvador Dali Museum building located in St. Petersburg, Florida has almost as many green elements incorporated into the building as there are works of art housed on the inside. The museum opened in January of 2011, but the design has been in the works since 2005.

The museum was designed by the firm HOK. HOK Florida sustainable design leader, and a member of the Dali Museum design team, Sean Williams, said it is important to try to incorporate sustainable features into new buildings. “If larger firms aren’t taking this approach, and being responsible for the environment, energy efficiency and material resources, you’re not helping the overall environment,” he said. “You’re actually doing more harm than good.”

But it’s not just about the sustainable features themselves. “It’s not just some kind of check list as you run through and check off ‘yes I have green lights, yes I have water efficiency,’ it’s more of a, how do we integrate it into not just the building, but the culture of people that are going to be using the building,” Williams said.

The goals for the design project were to meet the budget and to protect the artwork Williams said. So the sustainable features were in line with meeting these other two goals.

Some of the sustainable design features include “reclaimed water for all the irrigation … native landscape, reducing the need for a lot of that reclaimed water; we also looked at stuff like LED fixtures, we looked at daylighting,” Williams said. “One of the unique features of the Dali Museum is the daylighting in the actual gallery.” This daylight enters the museum through skylights that are hurricane resistant.

Another sustainable feature is reducing the buildings heat island effect by its light color. “If you were to go to Google Earth now you can see the white roof we put on there,” Williams said. Also on the roof is the Dali logo, visible to airplanes or Google Earth viewers.

“We used a fairly decent envelope out of concrete, obviously it’s a light color which is going to be high reflectancy so we’re not increasing the heat load on the building.”

Also taking advantage of the physics of heat to reduce energy use is the atrium. “We allow the hotter air to rise up and only cool the areas where people are going to be walking,” Williams said.

HOK/Moris Moreno

One sustainable feature is expected to save about 750,000 gallons of water a year. “We took condensate from the air handling units, we piped that into cooling towers as well as the fountain that’s in the front,” Williams said.

The Dali Museum facilities director Greg Pesce said that so far, the building has proven to be very efficient in the use of energy. He provided a memo from HOK that highlights all the sustainable features. Other design elements that save energy and resources include:

• Water efficient fixtures like low flush toilets, 
• a solar hot water system that will save 3000-3500 KWH per year, 
• using many recycled materials and 
• using a building management system to control and maximize the efficiency of the HVAC systems, as well as the features discussed by Williams.

As far as the actual design, Williams said that one of the challenges was the feature called the ‘Glass Enigma.’ This is a geodesic glass structure with more than 900 triangular-shaped glass panels in the main visual feature of the building. “It was a unique design challenge to create a signature element for the building that was also not impacting the energy,” he said. The insulated glazing of the unique glass panels in the Enigma take less of an energy load as compared to a standard curtain wall system.

It was also a challenge to meet the sustainability goals and the strict environmental requirements called for by an art museum. But because of features like the atrium and high ceilings, both things could be realized.

For the design process, the team working on the Dali Museum used a variety of software. “Early on we used SketchUp to kind of get us some of the massing ideas, and then we fed that into Rhino and 3ds Max. We also used Revit to document all the construction documentation.” Williams said.

HOK/Moris Moreno

“This Project could not have been done, in my personal opinion, without the help from Revit. Being able to introduce the form we put in there, being able to give the sections, elevations,” he said. “We were able to audit the model several different ways. I would say this project helped push us into a stronger Revit stance to the point where I would say 90 percent of our projects in the sustainable office and maybe across HOK are Revit.”

Kathy White, director of marketing at the Dali Museum, said that the public has embraced the new building. “I would say the main revival has been in attendance,” White said. “We reached 200,000 visitors after less than six months. In the old building we did 200,000 in a year.”

This increased attendance can be a design challenge in itself. “You can never predict how a user’s going to facilitate a building,” Williams said. He said you can’t build variables like unexpected numbers of visitors into your energy consumption design. So one of the lessons learned from the Dali Museum for future projects is “trying to move to stronger passive design … (to) help facilitate better energy efficiency that deals more with the actual performance.”

Brock Haroldson is a graduate of New Mexico State University where he received a degree in journalism and mass communications with honors. He has recently joined ConnectPress as an Editor after an internship at Albuquerque The Magazine. In his free time, Brock enjoys playing bluegrass and folk music, mountain biking, photography and cheering for the Denver Broncos.