Words J. Michael Welton
RENEWING THE NORTON
Foster + Partners renovates a classic 1941 Art Deco Museum in West Palm Beach
118
Clearly, this was not a renovation for the faint of heart. But after nine years, the sleek stucco-and-terrazzo results have created nothing short of spectacular. “2010 was the first site visit by Foster + Partners’ Michael Wurzel,” said Hope Alswang, executive director at the
Norton. “We were a 12-year-old Volkswagen, and then someone handed us a Lamborghini.” She’s not exaggerating. On February 1, the tag-team of Foster and Wurzel walked a crowd of about 200 reporters, editors and interested parties through their rationale for the redesign. “The original entry was on the east side, a courtyard was at its heart, and you entered on axis,” said Foster. “With the additions, somehow you entered on the side – I got to the original main entrance and there was a sign that said: ‘Oops – this isn’t an entrance. Please follow the sidewalk to the south-facing entrance.’”
Katy Harris/Foster + Partners, Nigel Young/Foster + Partners
Consider the hurdles that Foster + Partners overcame in giving new life to the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach, Florida: there was the original 1941 Art Deco design, commissioned to Marion Sims Wyatt, architect of Mar-a-Lago (US president Donald Trump’s Florida golf resort), by Chicago industrialist Ralph Norton and his wife, Elizabeth. There were the two modernist makeovers in the 1990s and 2003, shifting the main entrance away from South Dixie Highway and impairing the original east/west axis in the process. There was the total renovation over a two-year period, while galleries and collections remained open to the public. And there was an 80-plus-year-old Banyan tree out front, the environmental hero of this story.
