THE BUILDING "OUR BAUHAUS CONNECTION"
 Fort Lauderdale is not a city one would note as a place to see quality Modernist architecture. True, the roots of the famous South Florida Deco style is in modernist thinking with smooth stucco walls and flat roofs. Floridian modern began with distinct angular, abstract and floral detailing along windows and roof lines, developing later into the starker 1940s with rounded corners, banded stripes, porthole windows and glass brick.
Hundreds of buildings went up as Fort Lauderdale and surrounding Broward County expanded - greatly fueled by a development explosion between 1951 and 1967.
Many of the better local modernist buildings are lost in the residential sprawl, and genuine modernist designs by architects such as Roy France, Paul Rudolph, William F Bigoney Jr, Russell Pancoast, and more recently Donald Singer are slowly being torn down, to be replaced by newer developments.
Downtown Fort Lauderdale boasts two significant American modernist masterpieces. Both were built by architects with a strong link to legendary German art institution the Bauhaus. And both are within a city block of each other.
The Broward County Library (just a block north of the museum) was designed by Robert F. Gatje, longtime partner of Marcel Breuer, in 1980. A few years later the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale was built, designed by one of America's most celebrated modernists Edward Larrabee Barnes - himself trained by Breuer and another of the Bauhaus legends, Walter Gropius at the Harvard Graduate School.
Breuer was seen as the man who changed the emphasis of the Bauhaus school from 'arts and crafts' to 'Arts and Technology'. Alongside Walter Gropius he left Germany in 1935 as one of Europe's best known designers with a reputation built on tubular steel furniture and several building projects. By 1937 he and Gropius were heading Harvard's architectural facility. Gropius was the theorist, whilst Breuer was the poetic artist with close personal relationships with his students.
This Harvard partnership would revolutionize American house design and trained a generation of American Modernists. Henry Cobb, Ulrich Franzen, John Harkness, Philip Johnson, I M Pei, Paul Rudolph, and the museum's own architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. This generation of architects over the next 50 years would define the American city skyline and build some of its most important buildings.
 Ed Barnes was born in Chicago in 1915. His mother Margaret Ayer Barnes was a successful writer and Pulitzer Prize winner for her novel Years of Grace. His early studies of English and History of Art turned to architecture, where he initially worked in the offices of industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss in Los Angeles. Eventually he would set up his own New York offices with his wife Mary, curator of the Museum of Modern Art. He would go on to design some of the defining projects of 20th century architecture including the Dallas Museum of Art, Minneapolis's Walker Art Center, Washington DC's Federal Judiciary Building and the dramatic IBM Building on the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue. It is said that Barnes particular strength was museum design and in Fort Lauderdale we have one of his best examples.
The current museum building was the second attempt to build our city a new Museum of Art. Previously our facility had been located further along East Las Olas Boulevard alongside shops and restaurants. In the early 1980s the opportunity came along to re-locate under director George Bolge.
The first potential site was alongside the Intercoastal Waterway close to Bonnet House - part of a bequest from the Flagler Estate. This building was designed by Barnes and associate Michael Timchula and had a very different look to the building you see on Las Olas. The location was secluded and the museum was designed to fit into an environmentally sensitive waterside location. The project was curtailed at a late stage, just at the point when the foundations were about to be laid.
The current site on the corner of Andrews and East Las Olas became the focus of the project. Larrabee Barnes approach to this new site was to take a much more graphical form - its galleries and neutral spaces taking on forms and curves previously seen in Barnes' Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the State University of New York.
 Barnes approach to art galleries was to provide sequential paths that allow many different angles and viewpoints. Changing vistas and paths where works can be viewed from above or below. Of the Walker Gallery Barnes said "Quiet architecture does not compete with the art. Flow rather than form, was the concern". On Dallas he said "The form alternately advances and recedes resulting in semi-enclosed courts, bold breaks in massing and considerable interlock between open and closed spaces"
Barnes' associate on the project had been working with both Barnes and John M Y Lee for many years - Michael Timchula had been centrally involved with several other important gallery and museum projects in the 1970s and 1980s, including the Dallas Museum of Art, the Wichita Art Museum expansion, the Museum of Fine Arts of New Mexico and Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento California.
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