Miami: The Latest Architecture and News

Early this month at Design Miami/, Olson Kundig Architects celebrated the opening of “38 Beams,” a temporary collectors lounge named after the thirty-eight salvaged glulam beams that made up the structure. Originally milled in the 1950s, the Northwestern Douglas fir beams were once used to construct a Los Angeles building before being repurposed.

Approximately 15x30 inches around and up to 30 feet in length, 38 Beams formed a 2,400-square-foot lounge with an open lattice-work stacked 15-feet-high. The focal point of the space was a 28-foot Perrier-Jouët champagne bar lit by a chandelier of one hundred suspended light tubes designed by LILIENTHAL l ZAMORA. 

More about the structure and images, after the break. 

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On the heels of President Barack Obama’s recent decision to reform US immigration policy, FR-EE / Fernando Romero EnterprisE has released designs for a new Latin American Art Museum (LAAM) in Miami. The four-story museum, characterized by elongated, cantilevering terraces and sculpture gardens, hopes to become “the most significant institution for displaying Latin American art in America.” Continue reading to learn more.

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OMA is set to realize their first commercial residential project in the US: Park Grove. Planned to rise alongside the Biscayne Bay in Miami’s Coconut Grove, in close proximity to BIG’s “Grove” residences at Grand Bay, the three-tower luxury residential project will be the last building allotted for the “walkable” Floridan neighborhood.

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Fentress Architects has released plans for the $500 million redesign of the Miami Beach Convention Center. The news follows the City of Miami’s controversial decision to nix plans provided by OMA, who was originally awarded the commission after a high profile competition against BIG.

Fentress will be working with Arquitectonica and West 8 on a significantly scaled-down masterplan that will include the renovation of the 500,000-square-foot exhibition hall and 200,000-square-feet of existing meeting space, as well as a new 80,000-square-foot ballroom and outdoor event space.

Studio Gang Architects has released designs for a 14-story residential tower in the Miami Design District. Anchored by ground floor retail and topped with a resident lounge and swimming pool, the tower will, as the architects describe, “demonstrate Studio Gang’s principle of exo-spatial high-rise design in which the inside extends to the outside in a dynamic spatial arrangement.”

Each of the building’s 76 residential units will frame panoramic views of Biscayne Bay and surrounding Buena Vista neighborhood with Studio Gang’s contemporary reinterpretation of a “Florida Room.”

Construction has begun on Miami’s tallest tower: SkyRise Miami. Standing 305 meters above the Biscayne Bay, the waterfront tower will offer three viewing decks, a restaurant, nightclub, ballroom, exhibition space, and even the chance to bungee jump off its upper floors.

It’s designers, locally based arquitectonica, hope SkyRise will achieve LEED Gold upon completion in mid-2017.

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Following the controversial decision to scrap plans by OMA earlier this year, Miami Beach officials have selected Arquitectonica for the redesign of the Miami Beach Convention Center. In a significant scaling-down of OMA's $1 billion masterplan, the new scheme calls for the existing center to be kept and renovated to 'Class A' standards, along with the addition of a new ballroom, meeting space and rooftop parking. The center's existing parking lot will be converted into a 6.5 acre public park, designed by landscape firm West 8.

More on the Convention Center Controversy after the break

Florida International University’s Stempel Complex, designed by Perkins + Will, will be completed this fall. The complex will house the Extreme Event Institute, which will bring together a number of the university’s research and academic programs to study “extreme natural events.” The form of the building itself takes inspiration from natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, and is centered around an oval-shaped courtyard.

Plans to build a new soccer stadium in Miami have generated an argument this week between David Beckham, current city officials, and past city officials. The stadium, which will be home to a new Miami MLS team owned by ex-superstar Beckham, was originally proposed to occupy a site at PortMiami, with a design drawn up by Arquitectonica and 360 Architects. However, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez had concerns over the location, and earlier this month convinced Beckham and his group to consider an alternative location, a disused boat slip between the American Airlines Arena and Museum Park.

Now a group including former mayor Manny Diaz and Alexander Cooper, the masterplan designer for Museum Park have issued a statement condemning the new plans and saying they are "not in harmony with the vision of Miami as a world class city with parks and open areas available for all."

More on the row after the break

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Non-profit organization DawnTown has chosen Design with Company as the winner of its second official design-build competition. The Chicago-based practice’s winning entry, Pavilion MMM (Miami Many-a-chair Monument), will tell the multicultural story of Miami through metaphor by constructing a temporary monument of recycled chairs collected from local yard sales on Miami’s Cultural Plaza.

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Miami-based Arquitectonica and 360 Architecture have unveiled preliminary details for a 25,000-seat, open-air Major League Soccer (MLS) stadium at the Port of Miami. One of 30 locations currently being reviewed as a potential site, the downtown location could serve as the home for David Beckham’s MLS expansion team as early as 2018.

Rio de Janeiro-based writer Robert Landon has shared with us his experience exploring Herzog and de Meuron's Perez Art Museum Miami.

I am standing with Christine Binswanger, senior partner of Herzog & de Meuron, a few hours before the Perez Art Museum Miami opens it doors to the public for the first time. All around us, construction workers are making last minute adjustments, while troublesome clusters of VIPs take their first peak into the museum's airy, austere galleries. The excitement is palpable.

And yet I can't unpeel my eyes from the huge, hurricane-proof window before us. They offer enormous views of resplendent Biscayne Bay and the six-lane, 5.6km Macarthur Causeway that crosses it. Throbbing with traffic, the causeway is the kind of thing that, I imagine, people come to museums to forget. So I ask Binswanger, the museum's project architect, how her team approached this design problem.

"Problem? What problem?" says Binswanger. "That is what Miami is about. Anyway, I find it beautiful. Don't you?"

Suddenly I do. Or at least I find beautiful the building's wide-open embrace of Miami, causeways and all. And I suspect that this visual (and programmatic) permeability to the city's realities—natural and manmade—will define PAMM's institutional success.