Bass proposes a splash pad with Lawrence Weiner text and a marble sculpture for Collins Park

Collins Park would get a splash pad built around a text artwork by Lawrence Weiner, a marble sculpture by Adrian Villar Rojas beside the Bass museum’s entrance and a relocated sound installation, under an application the Historic Preservation Board is scheduled to review Nov. 10.

The City of Miami Beach is listed as the applicant, according to the Planning Department’s item summary. The Bass, at 2100 Collins Ave., describes the three works as additions to its Art Outside program, drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, in a July 13 letter to the board signed by executive director Silvia Karman Cubina.

What would go in the park

A splash pad. The letter describes a dry-deck play surface of about 2,500 square feet in the central part of the park, with spray jets set flush into the deck, built-in LED lighting and recirculating water held in an underground 3,000-gallon tank. Weiner’s 2008 text work “SHELLS USED TO BUILD ROADS POURED UPON SHELLS USED TO PAY THE WAY, AT THE LEVEL OF THE SEA,” now on the museum’s south outside wall, would be set into the deck. The letter says people would be able to reach nearby restrooms through the Rotunda.

A sculpture. A piece from Villar Rojas’s series “The Theatre of Disappearance,” a Carrara marble copy of the lower legs of Michelangelo’s David on a concrete pedestal, would stand on the parcel next to the main entrance. It would be about 11.3 feet tall with a footprint of about 11.5 by 10 feet.

A sound work, moved. Susan Philipsz’s five-channel “Too Much I Once Lamented,” now at the water feature at 22nd Street and Park Avenue, would move to the baobab grove along 21st Street, on five speakers mounted on poles. The 3-minute, 14-second piece plays in a loop with 7 minutes of silence in between, only during museum hours, and would be no louder than it is now, the letter says.

The museum says no trees would be removed and no enclosed space would be added, and that the work is designed to be reversible. The splash pad would sit level with the park, with no standing water, according to the filing.

Next steps

The board meets at 9 a.m. Nov. 10 at City Hall, 1700 Convention Center Drive, with the files posted on the city’s OneMeeting portal. The same agenda includes the Bass’s separate request for a new gallery and raised plaza. Items can be continued to a later meeting.