Miami Grows Up

Although it hasn’t lost its fun-loving and sometimes vulgar ways, the city is becoming more urbane.

By Allan Shulman

Miami hosted national conventions of the American Institute of Architects in 1946 and 1963, years that neatly bracketed the city’s remarkable postwar development. The 1963 convention, dedicated to “A Quest for Quality in Architecture,” is remembered locally for the caustic treatment of Miami’s iconoclast Modernist Morris Lapidus and his Americana Hotel in Bal Harbour, site of the gathering.

During the opening session, panelists Robert Anschon, Sir Basil Spence, George McCue, and Edward Hall pummeled the hotel (and much of Miami by extension), with Anschon finally calling it “incompetent, uncomfortable, and a monument to vulgarity.” Lapidus responded with courage, conjuring the value of human comfort, emotional satisfaction, and a sense of joy, asking, “… and isn’t that part of ‘quality of architecture’ also?”

The collision of vulgarity and genuineness, joy and relevance, continues in this subtropical city. In 2010, Miami is once again hosting the AIA. As in the past, the city’s endemic boom-and-bust economy has produced a remarkable stratum of growth and redefinition for conventioneers to digest. This time, Miami is more populous, more culturally diverse, and more urban. The pan-American identity nurtured for decades by city leaders has become reality, and this global metropolis with a large transnational population challenges the conventional categorizations of a North American city. At the same time, metropolitan Miami is more contained, having reached its geographic growth limits. It is redefining itself now socially, culturally, and physically within its current boundaries. In the process, the city and its designers are pulling meaning from, and renegotiating the visions of, the earthly paradise and hectic growth that have characterized its modern history. Its eastern corridor, including Miami Beach and the City of Miami, is the most visible terrain of this transformation: Here, the city is rebuilding, renovating, and experimenting with new types of infill architecture, while growing more vertical and more layered.

Metropolitan ambition

Miami’s skylines, probably the most iconographic facet of the city’s identity, have grown considerably in recent years. False barometers of urbanity, they are nevertheless an important reflection of metropolitan ambition, seemingly programmed into the city’s DNA (early skyscrapers already lined both sides of Biscayne Bay in the 1920s, only three decades after Miami’s birth). Towers can be an obtrusive reflection of contemporary real estate dynamics, while prepackaging the Miami way of life: pools, spa, tennis courts, and aroma gardens. These days, architects are doing a better job fitting high-rises into their contexts — mixing uses and carefully hiding large garages or mitigating their impact on surrounding streets.

Miami’s multiple skylines are best viewed from a car crossing the Biscayne Bay causeways or speeding along I-95. The panorama includes palisades of apartment towers along the waterfronts; alternative urban districts such as Coconut Grove, Coral Gables, Miami Beach, and Aventura; high-rise centers along the Metrorail corridor and near the Jackson Memorial Hospital campus; and tall buildings lining the city’s supergrid of commercial arteries. These growing urban centers manifest Miami’s polynodal structure. At the expense of a dominant center, the city has always cultivated many cores with origins as separate villages or suburban town ventures. Downtown is the most important hub in this urban structure. Once mainly a business district, downtown now boasts new high-rises creating a residential base for center-city workers and transnational nomads.

As a result, residential, rather than commercial, architecture now competes for prominence on the skyline. At 50 Biscayne Boulevard, for instance, Sieger-Suarez contrasts 54 stories of powerfully expressed floor plates with colorful exterior glass planes echoing the playful geometries of Roberto Burle-Marx’s 1970s sidewalk paving design. This graphic approach contrasts with Fullerton-Diaz’s nearby Everglades-by-the-Bay, where dual, classically tapered skyscrapers (49 stories each) hover over an expansive mixed-use pedestal.

Just to the north, Arquitectonica — the Miami design office that has gone global but still plays an outsize role here — designed the 57-story Marina Blue and 67-story Marquis. The firm’s inventive form making, bold use of color, and typological innovation are finding new, postmillennial expression along the bayfront. Next to Marina Blue, Oppenheim Architecture + Design’s 10 Museum Park, comparatively modest at only 50 stories tall, capitalizes on a clear expression of its structural skeleton with five 10-story divisions and staggered balconies producing a refined rhythm and texture.

South of downtown, large-scale development during the past four decades has jumped the Miami River and migrated south into the waterfront estates along Brickell Avenue. This well-landscaped corridor, with urban/suburban streetscapes redolent of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, is beginning to develop and function as a neighborhood, bolstered by several new grocery stores and assorted shopping and dining areas. Among the thicket of towers, several new landmarks merge offices, residences, and hotels. The sleek 70-story Four Seasons tower (Miami’s tallest), designed by Gary Edward Handel with Bermello Ajamil, anchors the district. The Banco Espirito Santo Building/Conrad Miami Hotel, by KPF with SB Architects and Swanke Hayden Connell, has a western facade that acts as a billboard, its glass walls inflected to create a parabolic arch symbolizing Miami’s status as a gateway to Latin America. At the north end of Brickell, the mega-complex Icon Brickell/Viceroy Hotel represents the apotheosis of Miami’s recent boom. Designed by Arquitectonica, it groups three deftly splayed towers, at least 50 stories each, over a landscaped skydeck perched almost 160 feet above the street. Whether the high-rise Brickell district, where abundant plazas, landscaping, and parking decks confront the pedestrian, can truly function as a neighborhood remains to be seen, but it seems to have achieved at least the critical mass necessary for a robust urban district.

Miami’s urban core offers few opportunities to comprehensively plan and build new districts. But Midtown — a 56-acre development in Edgewater, replacing a rail yard — provided an interesting exception. The mixed-use project, principally planned by Zyscovich Architects, encompasses about 15 new urban blocks. Its plan incorporates the street grid of surrounding neighborhoods, and provides tree-lined avenues with broad sidewalks, as well as a new central park. Midtown’s blocks are sized to permit garages to be mostly wrapped in habitable uses rising along the street facade.

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