Best Outdoor Art

The dreamer dreams that we are watching his dreams. On the back of the Buick Building in the Design District is a magical diptych by husband-and-wife artist team Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt. The 35-by-50-foot digital print of an original oil painting depicts a man sleeping peacefully in a bed. In the panel next to him is an Angel and Devil box. "In fact he is dreaming, perhaps of who he will be that very day," says Behar with a mischievous laugh. "Am I going to be the good Roberto or the bad Roberto?" The piece was designed to be seen from the westbound lanes of the Julia Tuttle Causeway, a reminder to drivers of the intimate space they've just left behind as they guide their cars to work. Real estate developer Craig Robins commissioned and financed the piece, which went up February 2000. Behar and Marquardt don't really consider the work a mural; they think of it as a two-dimensional sculpture because details from the diptych -- two surreal portraits hanging in the sleeping man's room -- also adorn the front of the building. The artists say that creates a sense of "seeing through the building."