In early October, the Berkowitz Contemporary Foundation (BCF) broke ground on Longleaf Art Park, a 15.5-acre cultural landscape and pavilion in Walton County in the Florida Panhandle. Designed by OLI Architecture, the site will center on Passage of Time, a monumental sculpture by the late Richard Serra, one of the defining figures of postminimalism.
Announced in 2024 and now under construction, Longleaf Art Park is meant to blend art, architecture, and ecology into a single experience. The project’s design team, led by OLI founders Hiroshi Okamoto and Bing Lin, worked closely with Serra before his passing to create a setting honoring both the artist’s work and the land’s character.
“The park and pavilion are inseparable, designed to feel as though they have always been here,” said Okamoto. “Native plantings recall the land’s history, while concrete facades – cast with the textures of felled pines – capture the passage of time.”
The Berkowitz Pavilion, in the design, is a low, rectilinear volume of concrete and glass. It will house Serra’s 217-foot-long Passage of Time. Inside, eight massive weathering steel plates, more than 13 feet tall, curve and tilt through space in Serra’s signature parallel arrangement. The rendering shows the sculpture’s rust-red planes set against an otherwise spare white interior, the surfaces working to catch the soft light that filters through the slatted skylights above.
Visitors will reach the pavilion by way of a winding boardwalk that threads through longleaf pine forest and native grasses. The pathway is set to pass over shallow ponds and through meadows tinged pink with muhly grass, leading to a glass-walled vestibule that frames the first view of the sculpture within.
Rather than impose itself on the landscape, OLI’s design tries to minimize the disturbance to the site’s existing ecosystem. New wetlands and berms will shape the terrain, managing stormwater while creating habitats for local flora and fauna. The surrounding pine flatwoods, a fragile and quintessentially Floridian ecosystem, remain largely intact, with paths designed to hover lightly above the ground plane.
Longleaf Art Park is set to open in 2026, and will be free and open to the public, offering workshops, tours, and educational programming in collaboration with the Cultural Arts Alliance and the Walton County School District. For Chloe Berkowitz, founder and president of BCF, accessibility is the park’s central mission.
“We believe powerful artistic experiences should be available to everyone,” Berkowitz said. “By placing Serra’s Passage of Time at the heart of this open, public landscape, we’re creating a cultural destination for locals and visitors alike.”
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