On April 2, 2005, we visited the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla. As wordy as I was before I published pictures at BTST, I didn’t write much about the place. “Housed in a mid-sized, appropriately modernist building, the Dali Museum is all Dali, all the time, as it should be,” was one line. I also considered how the museum came to be in central Florida.

As far as I can tell, I didn’t take a picture of the building. I did take a picture of bench on the grounds. Lots of people have taken pictures of it.

I didn’t realize until I read more about the place today that the Dali has been in a new building since 2011, and apparently the bench was moved to be near the new structure. I don’t remember whether the giant Dali mustache was there in ’05. You’d think I’d remember a thing like that, but memory is a eccentric thief, taking things you’d never expect.

Regarding the new building, the museum web site says, “Designed by architect Yann Weymouth of HOK, it combines the rational with the fantastical: a simple rectangle with 18-inch thick hurricane-proof walls out of which erupts a large free-form geodesic glass bubble known as the ‘enigma.’

“The Enigma, which is made up of 1,062 triangular pieces of glass, stands 75 feet at its tallest point, a twenty-first century homage to the dome that adorns Dali’s museum in Spain. Inside, the Museum houses another unique architectural feature – a helical staircase – recalling Dali’s obsession with spirals and the double helical shape of the DNA molecule.”