NowMiami

Architecture

Architecture in Miami

Miami has no zoning to speak of and a great deal of money, so its architecture arrives as set-pieces by imported names, most of them on the water. The last fifteen years turned the city into a showroom for the profession's biggest firms.

• One Thousand Museum

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  Completed 2019

  Zaha Hadid

  A residential tower opposite Museum Park, designed by Zaha Hadid before her death and finished three years after it. She pulled the structure to the outside as a white exoskeleton of curving concrete ribs that brace the tower and free the floors of interior columns, a web that reads as flowing lines from the street. Only eighty-three flats fill sixty-two storeys. The tower wears its engineering as ornament, the signature she left everywhere.

• Faena Forum

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  Completed 2016

  OMA

  A cultural centre in Miami Beach, part of a district a developer built around it. OMA, working under Rem Koolhaas, set a drum and a cube side by side in board-marked concrete and cut spiralling ramps and oculi through the round hall so it can be reshaped for anything from a runway to a rite. The geometry is severe against the district's gold. The room is dressed as a monument, built to give a private quarter a civic anchor.

• Pérez Art Museum Miami

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  Completed 2013

  Herzog & de Meuron

  An art museum on Biscayne Bay, raised on a platform against the storm surge. Herzog & de Meuron hung a deep concrete canopy over the whole building and draped it in columns of planting, so the galleries sit in shade behind a veranda of hanging gardens rather than behind a wall. The verandas are as much of the building as the rooms. It treats a museum in the subtropics as a place to get out of the sun first and look at art second.

• New World Center

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  Completed 2011

  Frank Gehry

  A concert hall for a music academy in Miami Beach, plain outside and folded within. Gehry kept the box simple and packed the atrium behind its glass front with the tumbling white forms he is known for, then aimed a wall of the hall at the park outside so concerts can be projected onto it for an audience on the lawn. The building performs to the street. A restrained Gehry, it spends its drama indoors and hands the park a free show.

• 1111 Lincoln Road

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  Completed 2010

  Herzog & de Meuron

  A car park at the end of the Lincoln Road mall, and the rare garage people visit on purpose. Herzog & de Meuron left it entirely open, carrying the sloping floors on wedge-shaped concrete columns of varying height with no walls or cladding at all, so the structure is the architecture and the parked cars are the fill. Weddings and shops share the upper decks. It is a parking garage rebuilt as civic scenery, which only Miami would pay for.