Seven years after the Norton Museum of Art unveiled a $100 million expansion, it’s planning to spend nearly twice that much to grow again.
The estimated $200 million renovation, which will cement the Norton’s disputed reputation as the largest art museum in Florida, will transform its West Palm Beach campus where it has flourished for 85 years.
While the 2019 expansion revamped the west side of the building, including moving its entrance to South Dixie Highway, the nearly 100,000-square-foot planned expansion is focused on the east side of the 6-acre site south of Okeechobee Boulevard.
Two buildings, one three stories and the other two, will be built on South Olive Avenue and a terrace with views of the Intracoastal Waterway will connect them.
The additions will feature galleries, classrooms, a sprawling second-story glass-walled ballroom and outdoor sculpture gardens. A traffic loop will be built in front of the museum’s original 1941 entrance on South Olive Avenue for buses carrying school kids and valet parking for guests attending special events.
When complete, the 132,000-square-foot museum will balloon to roughly 230,000 square feet, including its 37,000-square-foot sculpture garden, according to plans submitted to the city.
That will far outstrip the size of the Perez Art Museum in Miami. It features 120,000 square feet of indoor exhibit space, but also has 80,000 square feet outdoors, allowing it to stake its claim as the biggest museum in the state.
READ MORE: New West Palm Beach gallery spotlights overlooked postwar American artists, underrepresented groups
To accommodate the expected increase in visitors, a three-story 359-space parking garage will be built at the back of the Norton’s parking lot on the west side of South Dixie. Another 83 spaces of surface parking will also be available.
Attorney Harvey Oyer, who represents the museum, told the the city Planning Board on Jan. 21 that the need to expand so much and so quickly is a testament to the city’s pandemic-induced attraction to the rich.
“This is a high-level problem,” said Oyer, who also counts the city’s biggest developer, Related Ross, among his clients. “The post-COVID migration of wealth to our community occurred and we are bursting at the seams with people, donors willing to pay for it and donors willing to give their art to their local art museum. We’re very blessed to have this problem.”
Museum officials declined to comment on the expansion or the fundraising needed to make it possible. Museum Director Ghislain d’Humieres issued a brief statement.
“How much the Norton grows and when we implement those plans depends on the community’s needs and support for the project,” said d’Humieres, who took the helm of the museum in 2020.
Urges city to move quickly
While no timeline was mentioned, Oyer told the Planning Board that the museum wants to move quickly.
He urged the board to ignore a dispute between the Norton and city traffic engineers over whether the museum should be forced to create six parking spaces on Olive.
Just approve the plans and let the two sides work it out privately, Oyer urged. That way the plans can be presented to the City Commission for approval within 30 or 45 days.
“Inflation in construction is way beyond the (Consumer Price Index),” Oyer said. “Every month you delay is a substantial cost to us and our donors.”
Members of the Planning Board generally agreed with Oyer that the creation of the street parking spots was a needless and costly expense. But they agreed to let the museum’s development team hash it out with city staff rather than delay the City Commission’s review of the project. If the two sides can’t work it out, city commissioners can decide, they said.
Oyer said the parking space demand may be connected to the Norton’s plan to create an “art park” in the median of an east-west road that dead-ends at the museum. The median, which leads to the Intracoastal, is across from the South Flagler House, twin 28-story condominium towers being built by Related Ross.
The Norton’s plans for the sculpture garden are still being firmed up, Oyer said. They will be submitted later this year, but shouldn’t block the museum’s expansion, he said.
“You can decide the parking issue then,” he said.
The parking spaces, along with a city suggestion to convert Jefferson Road and Cranes Nest Way, which border the property, into one-way streets, should be considered along with other traffic issues, Planning Board members said.
Along with the construction of South Flagler House, nearby Palm Beach Atlantic University is booming. There has been talk of eliminating the traffic circle behind the Norton and making improvements on South Dixie to keep cars moving and museum-goers safe, they said.
Growing beyond 2015 plans
The speed of the Norton’s growth is breathtaking, Oyer said. The museum knew that the 2019 expansion would not be its last.
In 2015, when it got the go-ahead to move its entrance to South Dixie and add roughly 59,000 square feet for a grand hall, 210-seat auditorium, sculpture garden, restaurant and galleries, it also laid out its future.
The city then also approved the museum’s plan to eventually expand the museum to nearly 172,000 square feet. But, Norton officials realized, those plans were shortsighted. More space was needed to accommodate its growing collection and expanding educational programs.
That’s why it submitted the new plans that will add nearly twice as much space as envisioned in the long-range plan that was approved in 2015, Oyer said.
“To think that we were here 11 years ago and got a 39,000-square-feet Phase 2 approved and we have to come back to you 11 years later to make it 50% larger,” he said.
Like the 2019 expansion, the upcoming one will be designed by Foster + Partners, an international architectural firm headquartered in London.
Among its varied projects, it designed 2 World Trade Center, the Hearst Tower and 425 Park Avenue in New York City along with the reconstruction of Wembley Stadium in London, the Hong Kong Airport and the Reichstag building in Berlin.
Notable architects aren’t new to the Norton.
It was designed in 1941 by Marion Sims Wyeth. The New Yorker, who moved to Palm Beach, was also the architect for Mar-a-Lago, which is now the home and private club of President Donald Trump. Wyeth also designed the Florida Governor’s Mansion and Shangri La, Doris Duke’s home in Honolulu and The Church of the Epiphany on New York City’s Upper East Side.
This story was originally published by Stet News Palm Beach, a WLRN News partner.
