The Bass

John Collins arrived in the 1900s to farm avocados on the sandbar across the bay from Miami. The farming failed. The bridge he built to get his produce to the mainland — at the time the longest wooden bridge in the world — did not, and it opened the island to the development that became Miami Beach. His grandson Russell Pancoast trained as an architect and designed this library for the city in 1930.

What he built is early deco, and it is instructive to compare it with Ocean Drive. No eyebrows, no racing stripes, no rounded liner corners. Instead: mass, symmetry, a squared-off entrance block, carved relief panels, and keystone facing. Keystone is fossilised coral, quarried in the Keys, and if you look closely at the walls you can see the shells. The style here is closer to the civic deco of the 1920s than to the streamlined 1930s resort architecture eight blocks south.

Isozaki's 2001 addition sits behind and beside it rather than on top of it — a restrained grey volume that lets the keystone front keep the street. The 2017 work was mostly internal: floors lowered, ceilings raised, circulation rethought, gallery area roughly doubled without adding to the footprint.

The result is a small museum that reads clearly from the street and opens up inside, which is more or less the opposite of how Miami Beach usually works.

The Bass is not a permanent-collection museum in the way its origins suggest. Most of the floor is given to temporary exhibitions of contemporary art, often a single artist at reasonable scale, with the historic Bass holdings appearing in rotation and in dialogue with new work rather than hung as a survey.

That means two things for a visitor. First, check what is on before you go, because the show is the museum. Second, do not arrive expecting a room of Rubens; the European collection exists but is not permanently on view in full.

The scale is manageable. This is an hour, not an afternoon, and it does not attempt the breadth of a city museum. What it does have is a commissioning habit — the institution buys and installs work that stays, which is how Miami Mountain ended up permanently in the park outside.

The shop is small and good on design and exhibition titles. There is a café operation on site; assume it keeps museum hours rather than restaurant ones.

If you are in South Beach during Art Basel Miami Beach in early December, the Bass programmes around the fair and the whole Collins Park block becomes part of the week's circuit, with outdoor commissions in the park. It is the busiest and most interesting week of the museum's year, and the least restful.