In the 1920s and ’30s, the Art Deco movement took hold of Miami’s architecture, heavy-handedly bestowing its buildings with whimsical exterior ornamentation.

“It didn’t make any sense,” architect JacquesHerzogsaid during a press conference on Tuesday at the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Pérez Art Museum, a new and enlarged version of the former Miami Art Museum that opened Wednesday. “Art Deco was about decorated boxes with no great relationship and exchange between inside and outside.” The city’s visual landscape is of two opposing forces: a wealth of natural beauty — crystal-blue waters, lush stretches of palms, and year round sunshine — and the rows of lavishly embellished buildings that close their inhabitants off from it.

In contrast, the Pérez Museum has made Miami’s outdoors integral to its design, first by jettisoning the barriers between the interior and the exterior by wrapping the galleries in floor-to-ceiling glass windows that overlook the Intercoastal’s blue expanses. On the outside, sculptural concrete seating dots the front courtyard. Around the perimeter, a shaded wooden veranda punctuated with plantlife looks directly into the exhibition spaces, contrary to the institutional norm of hiding the artwork behind a series of heavy doors and impersonal lobbies.

“We were the first ones to say that we want to create an open space that is shaded and that is free, instead of a closed jewel box for those peple who already know or already want to know about art,” said Herzog & de Meuron partner Christine Binswanger. As part of the new museum’s mission, according to director Thomas Collins, the new building should not only be more accessible to both it local and out-of-town visitors, but it should be connected to the qualities so inherent to the city’s identity. “We wanted a place for people to gather that addresses our biggest competition: not other cultural institutions, but the beach.”

As a decorative bonus that provides the verandas with cooling shade, self-irrigating columns of native plants hang from the extended roof, thanks to collaboration with green-haired French botanist Patrick Blanc, inventor of the vertical green wall who also worked with the firm on its lush, 2007 CaixaForum in Madrid. Beyond an installation of Ai Weiwei’s 2011 “Forever Bicycles,” a worker hoisted on a cherry picker could be seen tending to the plants through the window.

“Architecturally, we just wanted to use natural ingredients: concrete, wood, plants,” Binswanger continued. “We tried to do this as much on the outside as on the inside.” (Herzog extended the culinary metaphor. “Cooking in the winter is different from cooking in the summer because you don’t have the same ingredients,” he said, referring to the firm’s very different approach to the more densely constructed, recently opened Parrish Museum on chillier Long Island.)

Inside the museum, exhibition spaces combine the inviting textures of blonde wood and concrete, the visual perks of glass, and (out of necessity) conventional walls. Surprise seating areas appear sporadically, from simple stools embedded in window frames to alcoves lined in benches upholstered in brown cork that resembles rusted steel. From gallery to gallery, a change in texture signals the transition from one exhibition to another, and alongside the art, the glass walls flood the space with natural light, naturally softened by the shadows cast by the perforated wooden roof that extends out beyond the gallery walls.

Binswanger simply describes the finished product, a transparent gem rather than the jewel box, as “basic”: “Basic in the sense of natural ingredients,” she told ARTINFO. “We didn’t develop some kind of super cladding or some kind of computer-generated something. It’s rectangular spaces, it’s good proportions, it’s daylight, it’s material. It’s reality.”