Miami has benefited from the development of a new state-of-the-art science museum, which opened last year.

The opening was the culmination of a major project that took over a decade to complete, with retired partner Victor Alvarez and the Firm playing a leading role in making it happen.

The Miami Science Museum was established in 1949 and was located in the Coconut Grove area of the city before Miami-Dade County voters approved a referendum to move the museum to a new site in Museum Park downtown, adjacent to our office.

“I was on the board of the museum when the idea of the new facility came up,” explains Victor, who was Miami’s Office Executive Partner at the time.

“The county and the city have made a big effort to rejuvenate the downtown area in recent years. I thought that this project to bring a beloved institution downtown was a very exciting one where we could play an important part. It was the kind of multi-party, multi-million dollar project that plays to the strengths of the Firm.”

The journey towards the relocation proved extremely complicated as plans for the 250,000 square foot facility took shape.

“Our legal work started during the bond issue used to fund the project, followed by the negotiation and preparation of the vast amount of documentation among the county, the city and other public and private constituencies related to the conception and development of Museum Park in general and the science museum in particular.

“It became an intense legal exercise and the Firm really delivered.”

The work delivered by the Firm in respect of the project supplemented the broader pro bono services provided to the science museum by our lawyers in Miami and New York over a 15-year period, including employment and immigration matters, intellectual property and dispute resolution.

Victor says: “It was very sophisticated work and I can’t tell you how much it meant to have the Firm behind me on this project.

“There is always a risk of non-profit entities with limited resources being poorly represented when negotiating their agreements, so having top-quality advice was critical to the success of a project of this size and complexity.

“The journey was long and hard, with enormous engineering and design issues, contractual disputes and fundraising challenges, but every time I visited the construction site it was amazing to see it coming together.”

The finished facility, now renamed the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, is an engineering marvel. Features include a planetarium, a 250-seat full-dome screen with a diameter of 20m, a 16-million-color projection system, and a three-story, cone-shaped, 500,000 gallon aquarium.

Victor says: “My favorite feature of the museum is the aquarium – you can’t have a science museum in Miami without an aquarium – but building it wasn’t easy.

“It required a continuous 24-hour pour of varied and particular qualities of cement delivered to the site in a very specific sequence and there was a significant chance of failure and material delays.

“I came out to the project site for much of the day and overnight hours to watch the process and thankfully it all came together perfectly.”

Looking back on the project, Victor is extremely proud of the Firm’s role in making the new facility a reality which, he says, is ‘frankly miraculous’.

“I’ve been visiting the museum since I was a child,” he explains, “so it was really special to take my two daughters and my 92-year-old mother to tour the new museum.

“I also take great pride every time I see the Firm’s name on the donor wall and I hope this close relationship with the museum will continue. It really would not have happened without White & Case.”