Global firm HOK is set to receive the Novum Structures Design Excellence Award for its design for the upcoming Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla. This annual award recognizes the creative use of Novum’s architectural enclosure systems in design, as well as provides a $10,000 scholarship to an architectural engineering student in the name of the winner.

The new Dalí Museum, which will house the world’s most comprehensive collection of art by Spanish surreal artist Salvador Dalí, will comprise of a 66,450-sq.-ft. building, featuring 16,000 sq. ft. of gallery space, a theater, retail store and community space, classrooms, and a library and research archive.

Two large, glass freeform structures—named “the igloo” and “the Enigma”—manifest as an iconic, architectural tribute to the artist. Each enclosed structure, which appears to melt over the museum like one of Dalí’s painted clocks, is more than 75 ft. tall and comprised of more than 900 triangular, glass panels. The panels—which were engineered, manufactured, and installed by Novum Structures—each flaunt an individual design like snowflakes; no two are identical in the entire project.

“HOK is most proud of the glass ‘Enigma,’ which bursts from the building and forms the atrium roof and cascades to the ground. It is the first use of this type of free-form geometry in the United States…The flowing, freeform use of geodesic triangulation is a very recent innovation, permitted by modern computer analysis and digitally controlled fabrication that allows each component to be unique. This has permitted us to create a family of shapes which while structurally robust more closely resembles the flow of liquids in nature,” says HOK design director Yann Weymouth.

Weymouth and senior project manager Will Hollingsworth will accept the Novum Structures Design Excellence Award on behalf of the firm at a media-only event, being held on August 11 at 11 a.m. at the museum. Novum Structures, Beck, and Dalí Museum representatives will also be in attendance to answer questions about the ongoing project.

“HOK is thrilled to accept the award and the recognition it represents,” says Weymouth. “It is important that the building speak to the surreal, without being trite…It was a challenge to discover how to resolve all the technical requirements of the museum and site in a way that expresses the dynamism of the great art movement of which Salvador Dalí was the leader."

The new Dalí Museum is set to open in January 2011; construction began on December 12, 2008.