Building Bacardi: Art, Architecture and Identity Exhibit

Coral Gables Museum, Coral Gables, Florida | 2013

Anyway you drink it…Bacardi rum is the mixable one.

Bacardi is best known for its rum and trademark bat logo. Yet the famed spirits company has also been a force in the use of commissioned architecture and art in service of building identity and brand. True to the company slogan, Bacardi has asserted its corporate identity through buildings designed by a potent mix of modernist architects with varying, sometimes radically different approaches to architecture. Similarly, artworks have been integrated and displayed in unexpected ways into the company’s buildings. Corporate headquarters, distilleries, bottling plants, and executives’ private homes have shaped and reflected Bacardi’s position as a regional upstart, a national icon, and a global corporation with outposts in spanning Bermuda, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. Chronicling 150 years of architectural history through the lens of the company’s own extraordinary story, Building Bacardi: Architecture, Art & Identity was curated by architect-scholar Allan Shulman at the Coral Gables Museum. The exhibit brings together more than 200 objects and images gathered from ten countries and multiple public and private institutions. It features work by the architects and artists who helped build Bacardi’s identity, and documents key works through drawings, archival photographs, models, objects, original artwork, ephemera, advertisements and citations in books and journals.

Photographs by Robert Gibson.