Craig Robins: “Furniture companies key to regenerating Miami Design District”

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in the second part of our interview with Craig Robins, the Miami property developer explains how bringing back furniture showrooms was the catalyst for transforming the city’s derelict Design District into the thriving luxury shopping destination it is today.

Dacra CEO Craig Robins portrait
Dacra CEO Craig Robins. Copyright: Dezeen

After the successful redevelopment of South Beach in the 1980s and 1990s, Robins began acquiring properties in Miami’s historical Design District, an area so named because of the proliferation of furniture companies that congregated there in the 1920s.

“It became a centre for furniture design in Miami,” Robins explains. “But by the mid-eighties, as places became more and more mallified in America, the Design District fell into disrepair.”

Holly Hunt showroom, Miami Design District
Holly Hunt showroom, Miami Design District

Robins says the key to redeveloping the Design District was to encourage furniture companies away from the malls and back onto the streets.

“What we did initially was to bring back the furniture design,” he says. “[American designer] Holly Hunt was one of our first tenants. That began the process and now you can walk around the Design District and see all the great furniture design.”

Elastika by Zaha Hadid, Miami Design District
Elastika by Zaha Hadid, Miami Design District

In 2005, collectible design show Design Miami launched in the Design District. Architect Zaha Hadid was named Design Miami Designer of the Year and Robins commissioned her to create a sculpture called Elastika in the atrium of the Moore Building, one of the area’s original 1920s furniture showrooms.

Elastika by Zaha Hadid, Miami Design District
Elastika by Zaha Hadid, Miami Design District

“Theodore Moore built the first furniture showroom in the neighbourhood in the 1920s,” Robins says. “It’s still an unbelievable structure. Zaha Hadid was commissioned to do a really magnificent installation inside the historical space.”

DASH fence by Marc Newson, Miami Design District
DASH fence by Marc Newson, Miami Design District

Other high-profile designers have left their mark on the Design District. Design Miami’s 2006 Designer of the Year Marc Newson created a white, undulating fence for the neighbourhood’s Design Architecture Senior High school (DASH).

DASH fence by Marc Newson, Miami Design District
DASH fence by Marc Newson, Miami Design District

Once the cultural and economic centre of the Design District was restored, Robins says it wasn’t long before restaurants and galleries started to open too, which in turn helped him to lure other lucrative businesses to the area.

“We had a cultural presence,” he says. “Restaurants were starting to open, galleries. It was then that I realised that the final ingredient to really catapult this neighbourhood into another level of creative offering would be if we could bring the fashion industry here.”

Louis Vuitton store, Miami Design District
Louis Vuitton store, Miami Design District

Hermès, Céline and Christian Louboutin were some of the early brands to set up stores in the district, and others soon followed: “Louis Vouiton, Christian Dior, Prada,” Robins lists. “I think we have a chance to be the most interesting neighbourhood in the world that has this balanced concentration of art, design, fashion and food.”

He continues: “The idea of synergies is that they start feeding each other and that the sum of those parts becomes so much greater than the whole, there’s this explosion that happens. Of course, I don’t think one can ever be arrogant, and despite our success, we have a lot of work to do. The goal, though, is just to make [the Design District] a great place: a great place to shop; a great place to find furniture; a great place to just walk around.”

Miami Design District restaurant
Miami Design District restaurant

We drove around Miami Design District  in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Jewels by Zequals. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project.

Our MINI Paceman in Miami

Our MINI Paceman in Miami

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Craig Robins: people thought Miami’s Art Deco buildings “should be torn down”

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: property developer Craig Robins discusses his role in transforming Miami’s South Beach from a rundown retirement village into a glamorous holiday destination in this movie filmed during Design Miami last year.

Dacra CEO Craig Robins portrait
Dacra CEO Craig Robins. Copyright: Dezeen

Craig Robins, CEO of property development company Dacra, was born in Miami and started acquiring properties in South Beach in the 1980s while still studying law at university.

Ocean Drive, South Beach, Miami
Ocean Drive, South Beach, Miami

“We had the largest collection of historical Art Deco structures in the same place in the world,” he says of South Beach. “It was very rundown: it had become a retirement village for an elderly population that was dying off and there was a crack epidemic. There were a lot of people that thought the buildings should be torn down.”

He continues: “There was a group of us that thought that, not only should they be preserved, but that they could really become this incredible legacy that Miami could offer to the world. So I began my career figuring out how to adaptively reuse these great historical structures.”

Marlin hotel in South Beach, Miami
Marlin hotel in South Beach, Miami

This was an unusual approach to property development in America at the time, Robins claims.

“[South Beach has] much more of a European feel,” he explains. “The structures are smaller, the neighbourhood is pedestrian-friendly, which in Miami is almost non-existent.”

Cavalier hotel in South Beach, Miami
Cavalier hotel in South Beach, Miami

Many of the Art Deco hotels along South Beach’s iconic Ocean Drive and the surrounding area were refurbished by Robins together with Island Records founder Chris Blackwell in the 1990s.

“Chris had sold Island and wanted to begin doing hotels,” Robins explains. “He and I did a lot of investing in the South Beach area together. From Chris I learned to produce creativity, because he was approaching real estate much more like a guy who made records, who worked with artists and ended up with a great creative product. That was the way we approached the buildings we were doing, and that’s still true for me today.”

Webster hotel in South Beach, Miami
Webster hotel in South Beach, Miami

Many of the buildings that Robins and Blackwell bought and renovated were quickly sold on again.

“Part of what we realised was that sometimes it was better for someone else to own a property so that the neighbourhood had this collaborative, competitive spirit where everybody was expressing themselves in their own way,” he says. “Gloria and Emilio Estefan bought the Cardozo from us very early on and did a beautiful job with it.”

Cardozo hotel in South Beach, Miami
Cardozo hotel in South Beach, Miami

He concludes: “It’s kind of the opposite to what Disney World does. The whole idea about Disney World is to give you a fantasy with something that’s fake. Our business model is to do something that’s real.”

We drove around South Beach in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Jewels by Zequals. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project.

Our MINI Paceman in Miami
Our MINI Paceman on Ocean Drive in Miami

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Daan Roosegaarde: “People can do what they want with my Crystal installation”

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde explains how his installation in Eindhoven consisting of hundreds of glowing LED crystals will change over time as some people steal them and others create new ones of their own. 

Crystal by Studio Roosegaarde

Crystal is a permanent installation that opened in Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week. It consists of hundreds of wireless LED crystals that light up when placed on the floor.

“The city of Eindhoven commissioned us to think about the future of light, where light gets liberated and jumps out of the lightbulb,” Roosegaarde explains. “We developed thousands of little crystals, which have two LEDs in them. The floor has a weak magnetic field and the moment you play with them they light up. No battery, no cable – it’s Lego made from light.”

Crystal by Studio Roosegaarde

Roosegaarde says that people have already started using the crystals in creative ways.

“People use it to write letters,” he says. “We had one lady, her boyfriend proposed to her. It’s great to make environments that are open to the influence of people. You can play [with the crystals], you can interact with them, you can share them, you can steal them. And I like it the most because it’s an experience you cannot download. You have to go here to experience it. The crystal and the location need each other.”

Crystal by Studio Roosegaarde

Roosegaarde will replenish the crystals every month, to replace those that are stolen. He also hopes that students will contribute their own crystal designs.

“We will open source how to make [the crystals] so students can make their own in different colours and shapes,” he says. “So Crystal will keep on growing. More crystals will be added, new shapes will arise, I will have nothing to do with that, people can do whatever they want.”

He adds: “In that way, it will be an ecosystem of behaviour and I think it’s going to be super exciting to see how the design will evolve.”

Daan Roosegaarde portrait
Daan Roosegaarde. Copyright: Dezeen

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Eindhoven
Our MINI Paceman in Eindhoven

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Martijn Van Strien’s Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear is “a kind of trend forecast”

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: graduate designer Martijn Van Strien explains that his range of coats made from single sheets of black tarpaulin are designed for an imagined future world where money and resources are in short supply.

Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear by Martijn Van Strien

Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear, which Van Strien exhibited at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate show during Dutch Design Week last year, consists of five coats made out of cut sheets of folded tarpaulin.

Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear by Martijn Van Strien

“It’s a kind of trend forecast for a dystopian future that, when everything is not so great with the economic stuff that’s going on right now, we might be heading towards,” says Van Strien. “It will be cold; people will be unhappy; we’ll be living in buildings that are just grey blocks. These are coats that we could produce for people that don’t have a lot of money, when we don’t have a lot of materials, when a coat needs to last for a lifetime.”

Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear by Martijn Van Strien

Van Strien says he chose tarpaulin because it is cheap, resilient and simple to work with.

“[The coats] are all cut from a single piece of black tarpaulin,” he says. “You then have to weld the parts together with heat. In the front I’ve made closures with magnets and that’s pretty much it. This material is super easy to work with, you don’t need to finish it or anything and it will last forever.”

Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear by Martijn Van Strien

The coats were designed to provoke a reaction and make people think about where the world could be heading, Van Strien says.

“A lot of people feel a bit creeped out [by the coats] and that is the goal, that we think about how we’re handling our social malaise,” he explains. “I see myself as a fashion designer, so I’ve looked at this from a purely aesthetic point of view. But the thought behind it is something that I feel very strongly about. I never make a garment just because it’s pretty, it always has to tell a story.”

Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear by Martijn Van Strien

Despite being designed for a future that does not exist yet, Van Strien says he has been approached by a number of people interested in putting the coats into production.

“I was not planning on putting these coats into production when I first made them, it was just a statement,” he says. “But a couple of parties have come up and they asked me if I wanted to take them into production so now I’m considering it.”

Martijn Van Strien portrait
Martijn Van Strien. Copyright: Dezeen

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

MINI Paceman outside Evoluon building, Eindhoven
Our MINI Paceman outside the Evoluon building, Eindhoven

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Gijs van Bon’s Skryf machine “writes poems on the ground with sand”

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in this movie filmed at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, artist Gijs van Bon shows us his machine called Skryf, which deposits a trail of sand behind it to form letters on the ground. 

Skryf sand writer by Gijs van Bon

Skryf consists of an adapted CNC milling machine on wheels, which van Bon controls with a laptop via a simple piece of software he developed.

“I can just type in text and it converts it to a code that the machine accepts,” he explains. “It writes letter by letter and in the four hours that I write per day it will write about 160 metres.”

Skryf sand writer by Gijs van Bon

Van Bon travels to different festivals around the world with Skryf and chooses new pieces of literature to write on the ground in each place.

“I’ve been with Skryf throughout Europe and once to Australia,” he explains. “In Eindhoven, I’m writing the poems of Merel Morre. She is the city poet of Eindhoven; she reflects on what is happening now in the city.”

Skryf sand writer by Gijs van Bon

Skryf’s carefully-written lines of poetry are destroyed by passersby or the wind almost as quickly as it can write them. Van Bon says that the whole idea behind the project is that the lines of poetry exist only momentarily.

“When you’re writing one [line of] text, another one is going away because people start walking through it,” he explains. “Once I’ve finished writing, I walk the same way back but it’s all destroyed. It’s ephemeral, it’s just for this moment and afterwards it’s left to the public and to the wind.”

Gijs van Bon
Gijs van Bon. Copyright: Dezeen

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

Dezeen's MINI Paceman at Strijp-S, Eindhoven
Our MINI Paceman in Eindhoven

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Pieke Bergmans’ blown-plastic VAPOR lighting “grows like a plant or animal”

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Amsterdam designer Pieke Bergmans explains that she used a process similar to glass blowing to create the plastic lighting she exhibited during Dutch Design Week 2013 in Eindhoven.

Vapor by Pieke Bergmans

Showcased amongst the pipes in a former pump house in Eindhoven, Bergmans exhibited two groups of objects as part of her VAPOR collection, which she created by heating and rapidly inflating PVC plastic.

Vapor by Pieke Bergmans

Swaying, ethereal shapes were hung in the main room, which Bergmans made by blowing air into the plastic until it stretched into an extremely thin, translucent tube at one end.

“The material is solid and somehow it fades away almost into nothingness,” she explains. “It dissolves like a gas. It’s very thin plastic at the ends, but on the top it’s quite solid.”

Vapor by Pieke Bergmans

A second installation in the basement of the pump house consisted of a series of twisted, rippled pipes.

Vapor by Pieke Bergmans

“The shapes are really organic, they grow like a plant or an animal,” she says. “That is something I really love, because I don’t like to design being very precise. I actually prefer that shapes grow into their natural environments.”

She continues: “So this plastic is actually grown. The only thing I decide is to add more or less air into it, or maybe add a few colours, or maybe add more material.”

Vapor by Pieke Bergmans

Bergmans explains that the pieces she exhibited at Dutch Design Week were the result of many different experiments.

“I’m very free and experimental and I try to understand the boundaries [of a production process],” she explains. “I will make things with lots of air and it will explode, maybe. After lots of experiments I know the limits; I know the edges. And actually, the edges are most of the time the nicest.”

Pieke Bergmans portrait
Pieke Bergmans. Copyright: Dezeen

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Eindhoven
Our MINI Paceman in Eindhoven

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Maarten Baas: “My Smoke furniture was an instant success”

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in the second part of our interview with Maarten Baas, the Dutch designer reflects on how his career has progressed since the burnt furniture he developed for his 2002 graduation project immediately brought him to the attention of the design world.

Smoke chair by Maarten Baas for Moooi
Smoke chair by Maarten Baas for Moooi

Baas’ career was launched by the success of his Smoke chair, which he developed for his graduation show at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2002.

“That was quite an instant success,” he says of the chair, which he created by singeing a second-hand piece of furniture with a blow torch and is now produced by Dutch design brand Moooi.

Smoke exhibition by Maarten Baas at Moss, New York
Smoke exhibition by Maarten Baas at Moss, New York

Baas continues: “In 2004, with Murray Moss [founder of design art company Moss] in New York, I made a solo show in which I did some design icons of the 20th century according to the Smoke principle – burning the furniture.”

Clay furniture by Maarten Baas
Clay furniture by Maarten Baas

Baas describes his range of Clay furniture, which is created by hand-moulding a synthetic clay around a metal frame, as a “next step”, before moving on to discuss his Real Time series of of video clocks.

Baas’ video clocks include Analog Digital (above), in which a performer replicates a digital clock by painting over and wiping clean panels on a glass screen. His Sweeper Clock (below) features two men with brooms pushing lines of debris to form moving clock hands.

He also created a grandfather clock, in which an old man seems to draw the hands of the clock from inside.

“Actually, all the concepts are still developing and still running,” he says. “Currently we’re working with Carpenters Workshop Gallery to make a series of two clocks: a grandfather clock and a grandmother clock.”

Grandfather and Grandmother Clocks by Maarten Baas, presented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery at Design Miami 2013
Grandfather and Grandmother Clocks by Maarten Baas, presented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery at Design Miami 2013

“As we speak, we are filming the grandmother clock. We are making a twelve-hour movie in which she is drawing the hands of the clock. In twelve hours time we should be finished.”

Shooting for Maarten Baas' Grandmother Clock
Maarten Baas’ Grandmother Clock being filmed at his studio

Although Baas has based his studio in the countryside outside of Eindhoven since 2009, he says that the city where he studied is still close to his heart.

“Eindhoven is a very industrial city, which makes it a very practical city,” he explains. “There are a lot of production companies that support people that want to make something and I like the rock and roll style of Eindhoven. It’s kind of rough and people have a lot of energy.”

Maarten Baas
Maarten Baas. Copyright: Dezeen

“I didn’t want to be part of the city that much anymore, so I went out of the city to the countryside. But still, if I come to Eindhoven I feel that energy of everything that is going on there and I really like that.”

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Eindhoven
Our MINI Paceman in Eindhoven

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

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Dutch designer Maarten Baas shows us his studio that “used to be a farm”

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in this movie we filmed during Dutch Design Week, designer Maarten Baas gives us an exclusive tour of his studio on a former farm a few miles north of Eindhoven

Maarten Baas' studio on a former farm
Maarten Baas’ studio in a former farmhouse

“This place used to be a farm; the chickens and the pigs used to walk around here,” says Baas, who we interviewed in his office in the converted attic of the former farmhouse. “Now we turned it into a design studio.”

Maarten Baas' studio on a former farm
Maarten Baas’ offices

Baas’ office is home to the original Smoke Chair that he produced for his graduation project while at Design Academy Eindhoven, which is now manufactured by Dutch design brand Moooi.

Maarten Baas' original Smoke Chair
Maarten Baas’ original Smoke Chair

“This was the prototype on which Moooi based the Smoke Chair,” Baas says. “It’s actually burnt furniture with an epoxy resin that sucks into the charcoal. It has been reproduced many times by Moooi, and still we make unique pieces here at the farm.”

Clay furniture by Maarten Baas
Clay furniture by Maarten Baas

Baas, who moved to the farm in 2009 with fellow designer Bas den Herder, converted the barn into a workshop where he produces other pieces of furniture such as his famous Clay series, created by moulding a synthetic clay around a metal frame.

“We squeeze our hands in the clay, you can see the fingerprints,” explains Baas. “After that, it dries out and it stays like furniture.”

Shooting for Maarten Baas' Grandmother Clock
Shooting for Maarten Baas’ Grandmother Clock

Downstairs, Baas is in the middle of filming for his new Grandmother Clock, commissioned by Carpenters Workshop Gallery, in which an old lady seems to draw the time using a marker pen from inside the clock.

Grandfather and Grandmother Clocks by Maarten Baas, presented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery at Design Miami 2013
Grandfather and Grandmother Clocks by Maarten Baas, presented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery at Design Miami 2013

“You’re very lucky to be here just at the moment that we are filming the new Grandmother Clock,” Baas says. “What you see here is a little cabin in which the grandmother will sit and a video that is recording her. The grandmother will indicate the time every minute with a marker. She will draw the big hand and the small hand and after a minute she wipes away the big hand, does one minute later and like that she goes around the clock.”

Maarten Baas' studio on a former farm
Maarten Baas’ homemade sauna in an old wooden caravan

Baas then takes us outside to show us his workshop in the barn, as well as a small sauna he made inside an old wooden caravan, before showing us a limited edition piece of Smoke furniture that is in the process of being charred with a blow-torch.

“This is a chair that we are burning for a client,” Baas starts to say, before having second thoughts about explaining the process in detail. “Ah, f**k it,” he says. “I’m not going to say.”

Maarten Baas
Maarten Baas. Copyright: Dezeen

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

MINI Paceman outside Evoluon building, Eindhoven
Our MINI Paceman outside the Evoluon building, Eindhoven

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Dezeen and MINI World Tour: the soundtrack

Our MINI Paceman in Miami

Dezeen Music Project: we spent 2013 travelling to cities around the globe as part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour. Here’s a playlist of some of the new music we discovered along the way, which we’ve been using on the soundtracks to all our movies.

This soulful house track is by South African DJ Floyd Lavine, who we discovered at the Design Indaba Music Circuit in Cape Town. We used the track on our video interviews with speakers at 2013’s Design Indaba conference, including David Adjaye on his relationship with Africa.

Listen to more tracks by Floyd Lavine on Dezeen Music Project »

We Have Band are a British three-piece who performed in Milan during the furniture fair at the MINI Paceman Garage, where we spoke to leading design journalists such as Joseph Grima and Johanna Agerman Ross about the key issues affecting the design industry in Italy.

Listen to more tracks by We Have Band on Dezeen Music Project »

Dezeen Music Project provided the tunes at the launch party of debut design show INTRO NY in New York during the design week. You Go To My Head by Kobi Glas was one of the crowd favourites, which we used on our movie about the High Line with designer Stephen Burks.

Listen to more tracks by Kobi Glas on Dezeen Music Project »

No trip to Berlin would be complete without some techno. We used Reso Dream by producer Simplex to soundtrack our tour around Kreuzberg with DMY Berlin founder Joerg Suermann.

Listen to more tracks by Simplex on Dezeen Music Project »

We used music by London post-rock band Dead Red Sun on all our movies from London Design Festival, including our interview with V&A curator Kieran Long on the museum acquiring the world’s first 3D-printed gun.

Listen to more tracks by Dead Red Sun on Dezeen Music Project »

Man Oeuvre is an artist we actually discovered in Berlin, but his fusion of European, Chinese and Indian samples seemed a perfect fit for Singapore, where World Architecture Festival and Inside Festival took place. We used this track called Feeling Beast on our interview with local architect Colin Seah about changing attitudes towards design in the city.

Listen to more tracks by Man Ouevre on Dezeen Music Project »

Our movies from Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, including our visits to the studios of Design Academy Eindhoven alumni Formafantasma and Piet Hein Eek, feature this track called Family Music by local hip hop producer Y’skid.

Listen to more tracks by Y’skid on Dezeen Music Project »

Maybe it reminded us of the Miami Vice soundtrack, but the retro synthesizer sounds on this track by producer Zequals just felt right for cruising around in the December sun during Design Miami. You can hear the track on our interview with Jacques Herzog about the new Perez Art Museum Miami.

You can listen to all the tracks we used on our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies on the Soundcloud playlist below. We’ll continue to publish video content from the tour over the coming weeks – watch the latest movies here.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour playlist:

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Terrence Riley: Miami was actually “laid out as a pedestrian city”

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: architect Terrence Riley takes us on a tour of downtown Miami and says that redevelopment of the historic area has coincided with a new emphasis on outdoor living in the city.

Miami River
Miami River

Downtown is a small nineteenth-century area of Miami located to the north of Miami River and the west of Biscayne Bay. Formerly the economic hub of the city, the neighbourhood was largely abandoned in the nineteen-seventies.

“The developers, their clients and the tenants needed bigger spaces,” explains Riley, a partner at Keenen Riley Architects and former director of Miami Art Museum and curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “Eventually you saw empty stores, empty office buildings and it was really across the river, in the south, where all the development began.”

Miami-Dade Cultural Centre by Philip Johnson
Miami-Dade Cultural Centre by Philip Johnson

Miami Art Museum, which moved to a new building designed by Herzog & de Meuron in December, was originally based in the historic downtown district as part of a cultural complex designed by American architect Philip Johnson.

“This is a very familiar tactic,” Riley says. “Take a really lousy neighbourhood and what do you do? You put the cultural facilities there, because they’ll go anywhere those people.”

“Miami Art Museum, from its earliest days, was put into this situation of trying to be a catalyst for spurring development downtown.”

Miami Center for Architecture and Design in a former downtown post office
Miami Center for Architecture and Design in a former downtown post office

Riley claims that downtown Miami is now a very different place compared to when the museum first opened in the nineteen-eighties.

“What were empty lots are being redeveloped,” he says, pointing out the old post office, which has now been taken over by the American Institute of Architects.

Downtown Miami
Downtown Miami

The redevelopment and repopulation of downtown Miami has coincided with the emergence of a renewed interest in outdoor living in the city, Riley says.

“A lot of people in Miami lived this air-conditioned life 12 months a year,” he explains. “Now I think the attitude is changing. You see that reflected in all the outdoor cafes and things like bike riding.”

“The whole idea that you can live downtown now, shop downtown and have restaurants downtown is something completely new.”

Downtown Miami
Downtown Miami

Many of the buildings in downtown Miami feature long arcades to shelter people on the streets from the elements.

“Miami was [originally] laid out as a pedestrian city,” Riley explains. “Miami lost a lot of that common-sense architecture with air conditioning and underground garages where you go directly from your car into the building.”

Perez Art Museum Miami by Herzog and de Meuron
Perez Art Museum Miami by Herzog and de Meuron

However, he believes that architects are now using similar principles in the design of new buildings.

“You’ll notice on the Herzog & de Meuron museum these long, broad, overhanging eaves that provide protection all the way around the museum,” he says. “These recall some of the more thoughtful, intelligent things that they used to do in the traditional city.”

Perez Art Museum Miami by Herzog and de Meuron
Perez Art Museum Miami by Herzog and de Meuron

We drove around downtown Miami in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Jewels by Zequals. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project.

Terrence Riley of Keenen RIley Architects
Terrence Riley of Keenen Riley Architects

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“laid out as a pedestrian city”
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