OLI Architecture breaks ground on Longleaf Art Park in Florida

In early October, the Berkowitz Up to date Basis (BCF) broke floor on Longleaf Artwork Park, a 15.5-acre cultural panorama and pavilion in Walton County within the Florida Panhandle. Designed by OLI Structure, the location will heart on Passage of Time, a monumental sculpture by the late Richard Serra, one of many defining figures of postminimalism. 

Introduced in 2024 and now below development, Longleaf Artwork Park is supposed to mix artwork, structure, and ecology right into a single expertise. The venture’s design crew, led by OLI founders Hiroshi Okamoto and Bing Lin, labored carefully with Serra earlier than his passing to create a setting honoring each the artist’s work and the land’s character. 

“The park and pavilion are inseparable, designed to really feel as if they’ve all the time been right here,” stated Okamoto. “Native plantings recall the land’s historical past, whereas concrete facades – forged with the textures of felled pines – seize the passage of time.” 

The Berkowitz Pavilion, within the design, is a low, rectilinear quantity of concrete and glass. It should home Serra’s 217-foot-long Passage of Time. Inside, eight huge weathering metal plates, greater than 13 toes tall, curve and tilt by house in Serra’s signature parallel association. The rendering exhibits the sculpture’s rust-red planes set towards an in any other case spare white inside, the surfaces working to catch the tender gentle that filters by the slatted skylights above. 

Guests will attain the pavilion by the use of a winding boardwalk that threads by longleaf pine forest and native grasses. The pathway is about to go over shallow ponds and thru meadows tinged pink with muhly grass, resulting in a glass-walled vestibule that frames the primary view of the sculpture inside.

Slightly than impose itself on the panorama, OLI’s design tries to reduce the disturbance to the location’s current ecosystem. New wetlands and berms will form the terrain, managing stormwater whereas creating habitats for native natural world. The encircling pine flatwoods, a fragile and quintessentially Floridian ecosystem, stay largely intact, with paths designed to hover frivolously above the bottom airplane.

Longleaf Artwork Park is about to open in 2026, and will probably be free and open to the general public, providing workshops, excursions, and academic programming in collaboration with the Cultural Arts Alliance and the Walton County Faculty District. For Chloe Berkowitz, founder and president of BCF, accessibility is the park’s central mission.

“We consider highly effective creative experiences needs to be accessible to everybody,” Berkowitz stated. “By inserting Serra’s Passage of Time on the coronary heart of this open, public panorama, we’re making a cultural vacation spot for locals and guests alike.”