The construction of a well-equipped museum building marks an important change in the cultural landscape of a city. Rarely on the map of major cultural destinations, the Tampa Bay area recently got not just one, but two, such additions, whose openings within less than a year created a momentous tectonic shift in the cultural scene. Built on comparable budgets and each located at a prominent waterfront site in its respective downtown, the Tampa Museum of Art (TMA) and the Dalí in Saint Petersburg are not only welcome new facilities, but also significant architectural events for the fast-growing metropolis. That, however, is where the similarities between them stop: as institutions, as well as architectural artifacts, the two museums could hardly be more different. The Dalí was custom-built for a prestigious private collection; TMA will mainly host temporary exhibitions, its own collection limited in size. Even more importantly, their new buildings offer vastly differing visions of the purpose and responsibilities of the twenty-first century museum and of architecture’s place in contemporary culture.

The Dalí is home to the largest collection of Salvador Dalí’s works outside of Spain. Founded by the Cleveland couple Eleanor and A. Reynolds Morse, the collection currently counts 96 paintings from all stages of the artist’s career, including 37 from his Surrealist period, as well as more than 2,500 works in other media: drawings, lithographs, watercolors, photographs, jewelry, and various objects. This treasure was previously housed in a converted warehouse nearby, which was inadequately sized and equipped for such purpose. The new facility, designed by Yann Weymouth of the international firm HOK, finally allows for all the paintings to be permanently displayed. At the core is a custom-built gallery encased in an impenetrable concrete shell and raised on the third floor to escape Category 5 hurricanes and flooding. It exhibits paintings in roughly chronological order, from Dalí’s early student works to his “Nuclear Mysticism” phase and beyond. The chronological path is punctuated by seven niches displaying under specially designed skylights the largest formats from Dalí’s late career. Elegant wooden partitions, which define a complex, somewhat labyrinthine, exhibition space, generate a sense of warmth, intimacy, and luxury, although the space often gets too crowded with visitors to allow for quiet contemplation of the exhibited art. In contrast, the temporary exhibition space across the hallway is generous and open. At the time of my visit, it showed Dalí’s reinterpretation of Goya’s Caprichos and a looping video of Luis Buñuel and Dalí’s 1929 film Un chien andalou, but in the future it will also be used for temporary exhibitions of contemporary artists. The museum offers scholars an opportunity to study the remainder of the collection in the second-floor library, which also includes a sizeable archive of documents, and the ninety-six seat auditorium on the ground level provides space for lectures and film projections.

In order to reach the decorum of the galleries, however, the visitor has to go through a much louder experience that offers a decidedly populist perspective on Dalí’s opus. Weymouth built his reputation by working for Ieoh Ming Pei on such prominent museum projects as the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art and the expansion of the Louvre, both of which are evoked in the Dalí’s austere concrete mass punctured by a glazed central atrium. But Pei’s sharp, cool abstraction is absent here: instead of the razor-blade elegance of the East Wing and the ethereal filigree of the Louvre pyramid, the Dalí features a squat box in exposed concrete invaded by an amorphous glass “blob” above the atrium, and supported by a rather massive steel substructure necessary to withstand the hurricanes. Whether approached from the waterfront or from the nearby parking lot, the building appears like an impenetrable object that sits inertly in its beautiful surroundings, ignoring even the adjacent public plaza and offering no relief from the harsh Florida sun.

The defining visual feature, the glass blob, moves the museum far into the territory of literal signification. Of course, its “melting” form immediately evokes Dalí’s popular motifs; and in case anyone missed the reference, it is even named “Enigma,” to evoke the titles of several of his paintings. What melts here, however, are not clocks and watches; made possible by the latest technology of digital fabrication, the triangulated structure is a warped version of the geodesic dome that stands atop Dalí’s original museum in Figueres, Spain. Despite conflating multiple references, the “Enigma” remains remarkably un-enigmatic, pointing to its referents with the subtlety of a billboard. Similar strategies of theme-park-ish signification and branding permeate the building’s exterior and interior: from the outcrops of colorful sandstone (another leitmotif of Dalí’s work), the “Avant-Garden” at the entrance, and a “melting” bench behind the building, to the tapering concrete spiral of the staircase inside, which simultaneously refers to the artist’s obsession with DNA and invokes the motif of animals with absurdly long legs. For a museum devoted to an artist who delighted in provoking and confusing, all of this simply makes too much sense. The result is dangerously close to what Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s paean to architectural populism, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977 [revised edition]), termed the “duck”: a building that takes the shape of its own content, named after the famous Big Duck poultry shop in Long Island.

Appropriately, it is the commercial logic of Las Vegas that provides the key to understanding not only the literalism of the Dalí’s forms, but also the organization of its public spaces. Like a Vegas hotel, where the guest has to pass by rows of slot machines to reach her or his room, the museum forces its visitors to enter through the aisles of an expansive souvenir store, complete with supermarket baskets. Bypassing the labyrinth of posters, tchotchkes, Spanish wines, and about a dozen Dalí-branded perfumes is physically impossible, but books and journals are more difficult to find, tucked away at the back, behind the checkout counter. When they finally pass through the store into the glazed atrium, visitors find themselves squeezed between the tightly packed tables of the “Gala” café and the reception desk, which merges too closely with the narrow spiral staircase.

Yet, one has to admit that the Dalí is extremely successful at what it set out to do: attract visitors. Even with the $21 ticket, on both occasions I visited, it was packed to the point of impeding comfortable circulation, and in the first nine months after its opening, it received almost 150—mostly positive—reviews on Trip Advisor, a clear sign that it has become a tourist attraction. Why then object to its success? There is certainly nothing wrong with attracting visitors to a museum, nor with blurring the line between “high” and “low” culture; after all, Dalí himself contributed to erasing that division. One might even argue that overt commercialism may be appropriate to an artist who made self-commercialization into an art form. But the strategy, when employed un-self-consciously and without even a hint of irony, ultimately does a disservice to the artist himself. A museum not only stores but also interprets its holdings. Regardless of his notorious flirtation with kitsch, the work of Dalí the artist contains a complex, multivalent core that is not reducible to mere spectacle. Dalí the museum, however, just like Weymouth promises on HOK’s website, aims to be “extremely easy to understand,” in the process reducing art to the lowest common denominator and leaving no room for any other, more challenging, interpretation.

In complete contrast with the Dalí, the new Tampa Museum of Art strives to create as “neutral” a framework as possible for its contents. Floating over a recessed glazed ground floor, the building is a long rectilinear “jewel box for artworks” with a minimum of outside articulation, and clad in a double-layered metallic skin punctured by 900,000 fist-sized circular holes. Designed by renowned architect Stanley Saitowitz and his San Francisco-based firm Natoma, TMA is an exercise in minimalism that verges on sterile, but ultimately achieves its goals with remarkable aplomb.

Founded in 1979, TMA is a young museum, whose holdings started as a collection of contemporary photography and have since expanded into earlier periods of that medium. A second strength is a five hundred-piece collection of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art, which mainly includes painted pottery. Under the current director, Todd Smith, the museum’s focus is on temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art; major shows since the opening of the new building were devoted to Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas’s sculpture, and language-based contemporary art from the collection of Hadley Martin Fisher. Small selections from the permanent collection are exhibited as well. The accent on modern and contemporary, Todd told me, will be tempered every few years by a show of ancient art. Similarly to the Dalí, TMA was long housed in an inadequate older building, but the process of acquiring the new facility was long and arduous, fraught with political haggling, including a failed project by the “starchitect” Rafael Viñoly, which was scrapped because of its exorbitant price. The executed building is the result of an architectural competition, and its success, confirmed by a 2011 American Architecture Award, is a testimony to the often ignored opinion that competitions are still the best way of selecting designs for large commissions of public significance.

At 66,000 square feet, TMA is about 2,000 sq. feet smaller than the Dalí, yet it feels more spacious thanks to its simple, open layout. In plan, the museum is organized in two squares, each subdivided into three-by-three structural modules; one half is public, the other contains administrative space. Similarly to the Dalí, all rooms for storing and exhibiting art are lifted to the second and third floors, above the flood lines, and the whole ground level is used predominantly for circulation. On upper floors, some of the modules are cut out of the main mass to enliven the experience: a top-lit, three-story lobby penetrates the core of the public half of the building; a balcony with sculptures opens from one of the exhibition rooms; and open-plan staff offices gather around a bottomless courtyard. The simplicity of the modular layout allows for considerable flexibility of use, as testified by the recent conversion of one of the second-floor storages into an exhibition space. The extremely sparse interiors throughout the building are all white, with the exception of the lobby, where the metallic skin creeps inside with its obsessive pattern of circles. All the rooms, however, are spacious and airy and ultimately pleasant to occupy, despite their frosty atmosphere.

Where TMA really excels is in its straightforward response to the site. The building is located in downtown Tampa, on the bank of the Hillsborough River and at the edge of a public park, which includes the recently restored Kiley Garden, the 1988 project of the famous landscape architect Dan Kiley. The simple gesture of recessing the ground floor along the park via a dramatic forty-foot cantilever intimately connects the otherwise austere structure with the surrounding public space, creating a generous urban loggia that provides shaded access to the main entrance, as well as room for special events. Conversely, the interior spaces take full advantage of the attractive views of the park and the river: the glazed ground-floor café by opening onto the loggia, the curatorial offices through the cut-out courtyard, and the classroom and the lecture hall through a narrow slit in the façade. Even the building’s anodized aluminum skin engages in dialogue with the surroundings as a nod to the metallic “Moorish” spires of the Victorian Henry B. Plant Museum across the river. But the skin is not merely reactive: it asserts a strong new visual element into the urban space, yet one that constantly shifts with the changing light. By day, as the visitor moves around the park, the metallic sheen and the moiré effect of the cut-out holes transform the building from a glistening jewel box to a misty cloud that blends with the sky. By night, the main façade comes alive through concealed computer-controlled LEDs, a three hundred-foot light installation by the New York digital artist Leo Villareal. (The installation is also intended as permanent support for the city’s biannual Lights on Tampa public art program.) Part of the architectural concept from the start, the installation bursts every evening into colorful electronic fireworks, an uncanny marriage of the austere and the exuberant, the permanent and the ephemeral.

Ultimately, the Tampa Museum of Art is not without reproach. Its most engaging appearance exists only in the nighttime; by day, it is entirely dependent on lighting conditions, and if they are not good, it can easily turn into a dull leaden box. The perforated skin does not deliver the level of transparency promised by the original competition renderings; and the ground floor really opens up only in the short stretch toward the river, its milky glass cladding otherwise as impenetrable as concrete. Also, the simple spatial layout verges on the simplistic. But in the end, the building delivers as a functioning museum. Its minimalism is aestheticized without being precious, leaving room for the contents to have their own voice. Most importantly, it advocates the view of a museum as an integral part of the urban community it serves, a welcome message in one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States.