Miami, Showcase of the Starchitects

Miami is a city that recognises and revels in architecture. From the Art Deco that created the image of Miami Beach to MiMo (Miami Modernism), which ensured it carried on swinging into the boom years of the mid-century, this is a metropolis where spectacle meets speculation. And although we might still associate it with the pinks and pistachios, the ice-cream pastels of its sunny Deco delights, you might also argue that Miami has been comprehensively remade in the image of contemporary architecture. The skyscrapers and condo towers, the big public museums that the city formerly lacked and the funky curios (which it not only tolerates but welcomes in a way that other more conventional cities might not) have made it a destination for big-name architects drawn in to pump up its image of luxury and modernity. From Herzog & de Meuron to Zaha Hadid, it features some of America’s slickest new buildings, occasionally as surprise and delight, often as marketing and PR, but almost always worth exploring.

Miami Design District

Art Basel Miami is often given the credit for restarting the design and architecture scene in the city, but arguably just as pivotal was the emergence of the Miami Design District. Founded by developer and collector Craig Robins and initially based around the old 1920s Moore Building (a one-time furniture store), the district emerged in a neighbourhood of faded and dilapidated buildings just west of Biscayne Boulevard. Robins bought a bunch of properties in the 1990s and commissioned young practices to make something of them. The best are really very good indeed, notably the super-Pop Museum Garage (Terence Riley, WORKac and Juergen Mayer H, among others) and Johnston Marklee’s elegant Façade. He also commissioned or acquired and restored art and design works for public spaces, including visionary engineer Buckminster Fuller’s striking Fly’s Eye Dome and Zaha Hadid’s Elastika, stretching between the levels in the Moore Building’s atrium.   Over recent years, the palm-lined sidewalks have been colonised by upscale fashion stores, bringing money and glitz but making the whole thing a little more Rodeo Drive than design quarter. There are, however, a number of excellent art museums around, including the ICA Miami (designed by the Madrid-based architects Aranguren + Gallegos), which also recently acquired the very fine, minimal white former de la Cruz Collection building (John Marquette Architects). Most of all, the Design District is walkable, its buildings striking, often bizarre and occasionally a little cheesy, but it is also, frankly, totally pleasurable.

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