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Vice Mayor Ken Keechl speaks with international artist Michel Oka Doner at the new Terminal 18 under construction at Port Everglades
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DATE: August 26, 2009
MEDIA CONTACT: Kimberly Maroe,
Public Information Manager, Broward County Commission
PHONE: 954-357-8053
EMAIL: kmaroe@broward.org
When the new Terminal 18 opens in Port Everglades, passengers will experience Broward County in a whole new way. The world class terminal will welcome the world's largest cruise ships and welcome travelers with world class art.
Broward County Vice Mayor Ken Keechl met with international artist Michele Oka Doner this week as she began work creating a 3,000-square-foot work of art in the center floor of the new terminal, which will serve as the home for Royal Caribbean International's new Oasis-class mega cruise ships.
"You don't build a terminal of this magnitude to accommodate the largest ships in the world without great vision. Ms. Doner's vision expresses what this facility is about: an oceanic voyage, a journey, natural elements and experiencing travel in a whole new way," said Vice Mayor Keechl.
The art concept is to create a "well-traveled" floor, a work of art embedded in the building itself and accessible to every arriving passenger. Beautiful deep green and blue terrazzo matrices will contain a lively narrative of ocean currents and trade winds encircling the earth. A bronze sculpture of an eight-foot globe will be depicted in a spinning manner. The globe will be energized with crisscrossed longitudinal and latitudinal lines. Enhancing the movement will be great sweeps of iridescent mother-of-pearl. In the narrower portion of the floor, ocean currents will pick up the sense of motion begun by the spinning globe, carried by the winds, and resulting in a wave-like pattern. Also represented will be bronze seeds, drawn from actual seeds that are known to drift far and wide in the currents. The composition in its entirety is buoyant and dramatic, a work of art that speaks of travel by wind, currents, and ultimately boarding the ship.
Michele Oka Doner is one of today's foremost artist-designers, whose prodigious career spans four decades. She is well known for her numerous public art installations, including "A Walk on the Beach," at The Miami International Airport (1995-2008) which features nearly a mile of dark terrazzo inlaid with bronze and mother of pearl. Recent work includes collections with Christofle and Steuben Glass as well as public art projects at Rutgers University, the Ocean County Library, both in New Jersey, and the University of South Florida in Sarasota.
Port Everglades is more than tripling the size of Cruise Terminal 18 in time for the arrival of Royal Caribbean International's 5,400-passenger Oasis class of ships, which will be the world's largest cruise ships. The first of the two sister ships, Oasis of the Seas is scheduled to arrive in November 2009, followed the next year by Allure of the Seas. Once completed, Terminal 18 will become the largest single-ship cruise terminal in the world.
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