Design On The Rise
It was the parking garage seen round the world. When 1111 Lincoln Road opened in 2010, the car-storage structure was unlike anything anyone in Miami Beach—or anywhere else for that matter—had ever encountered. Rising above one of the city’s most popular shopping districts, the building sat on a glass-walled base of commercial and retail space, its seven seductively skinny concrete floor plates supported by a muscular, asymmetric series of trapezoidal cement shards. The garage appeared to be on the edge of balance; it became an instant (and highly Instagrammable) local landmark.
What 1111 Lincoln Road turned out to really be on the edge of was an explosion of starchitect-led luxury real estate developments that are now remaking the city. “Today in Miami, you’re expected to do modern, exciting buildings; you’re expected to think of architecture as art,” says Bernardo Fort-Brescia, cofounding coprincipal of Arquitectonica, one of the area’s most renowned design firms. “Every architect wishes they had a project here now. This is their showcase. The world will see them here.”
Sometimes, it seems like every architect doesn’t just wish for but actually has a pending ultra-luxe project in the city these days: Richard Meier is flanking the 1930s-era Mediterranean revival-style Surf Club, in Miami Beach, with low, rectilinear glass buildings that will house a Four Seasons; São Paulo– based Isay Weinfeld is remaking South Beach’s Shore Club as a stateside outpost of Brazil’s Fasano hotels. The late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, meanwhile, had recently finished designing the sculptural, 83-unit One Thousand Museum condo tower before her death in March. It’ll feature a $50 million duplex penthouse, a private helipad and an indoor aquatic center—and when the skyscraper is completed in 2018, it will undoubtedly leave Hadid’s mark on the city for years to come.
