Miami – The Holiday Destination That Wants You To Stay Forever

If you’re used to Europe, or much of the USA, it’s hard to see a palm tree and not assume you’re on holiday. Miami was long a destination where money and people passed through quickly – hopping on cruises, down for the weekend. But now it’s up to something new; it wants you to stay. It wants you to stay for a week or two. It wants you to stay for good. And there are plenty of reasons why people are listening.

Not long ago. Miami Beach was “where neon went to die”, ‘according to the acerbic American comedian Lenny Bruce. The 1950s heyday of Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe was superseded by the age of cheap flights to the Caribbean and the conversion of some Orlando cattle pastures into Walt Disney World. Tourists in Miami disappeared. Construction stopped. And then it got worse. Someone said “Miami”, you said “Miami Vice.” The iconic TV show of hazy sunsets, dirty cops and dope was based on raw truth.

By the early 1980s, the fragile city was eaten from the inside out: the perfect gateway for South American drugs to make their way towards northern consumers. The only glamour left by the time I moved to the USA in 1989 was a crumbling Art Deco district, an ageing population and Miami Beach’s famous southern tip – by then as crime-ridden a neighbourhood as existed in all of the country. It’s unrecognisable now.

Buildings on South of Fifth Street command the best views and prices in town. Cranes cut the sky and restaurants seem to open weekly. Historically a boom-and-bust city, Miami used to lie down and play dead after a crash. But in 2008, it reacted to the financial crisis building new museums, a stadium, the New World Symphony space designed by Frank Gehry and countless office towers.

Art Basel Miami Beach which launched in December 2002 and, before the decade was out, had become a fixture on the global art calendar – showed that the place was capable of attracting a regular, well-heeled clientele. And was proof that Miami wasn’t so cultureless after all.

Perhaps it was Art Basel-inspired, but now there’s another evolution. The buildings of Miami Beach, so many still awkward and downtrodden, are being turned into works of art themselves. The names attached to the new skyline attest to the accompanying ambition: Pritzker Architecture Prize winners Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster. Zaha Hadid, Richard Meier, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

One of the most ambitious projects is by Alan Faena. While others are building hotels or apartments, the Argentine developer is creating a whole neighbourhood: the Faena District. Yes, there’s a hotel, the Faena Hotel Miami Beach, but that’s merely one of several architectural statements in its six-block radius. Faena calls it “a unique place, a utopian place where the best minds in the world have the freedom to brainstorm”.

His version of Utopia lies on either side of Collins Avenue, between 32^nd and 36^th Streets of Mid-Beach, one half running towards the Atlantic Ocean, the other spreading back to the waters of Indian Creek. The beachfront features Faena House, a residential tower with sharp wrap-around terraces and a plush penthouse. Yards away is Rem Koolhaas’ stunning Faena Forum, an arts centre due to open this year. From the outside, the structure is a dazzling white drum and cube, pierced with tall windows.