Hasta La Ideas

Here are some photos of the Miami Beach SoundScape park by Dutch landscape architects West 8, located next to Frank Gehry‘s New World Centre (see our earlier story) in Miami Beach, Florida.

The Miami Beach Soundscape/Lincoln Park is littered with palm trees, pergolas and a meandering mosaic path, while an array of white aluminium wireframe structures mark the entry points of the park.

The landscape forms part of the New World Symphony campus and the orchestral academy will extend its program to the park with sound, theatre and video installations.

Video art and concerts will be projected onto a wall of the New World Centre, providing the park with a giant outdoor screen.

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Here’s some more information from West 8:

Miami Beach SoundScape / Lincoln Park – Miami Beach, USA

Grand opening West 8 and Frank Gehry in Miami Beach

On January 25 Miami Beach Soundscape / Lincoln Park, designed by Dutch firm West 8 opens to the public. The park is part of the New World Symphony campus of Pritzker prize-winning architect Frank Gehry.

In 2009 West 8’s winning design for Lincoln Park was unanimously chosen by the Miami Beach Commission. The park is part of the New World Symphony Campus, which includes a concert hall and a conservatory where young talent coming to study and perform.
Lincoln Park is a new meeting place in town. Centrally located in the Art District at the monumental terminus of lively Lincoln Road, the park has multiple functions.

During the day the park is shaded by pergolas and palm trees. In the evening it is a cultural hotspot, one of the special attractions of the park being a video and sound installation – projecting concerts and video art on building’s 700m2 wall, which serves as an outdoor screen for the park. The park is an urban garden that expresses the euphoria of Miami, and will be actively programmed for public and cultural events.

The Lincoln Park site is a small – slightly larger than 1 hectare in size – urban site located at Washington Avenue and 17th Street in South Florida that strives to establish a new precedent for parks in the City of Miami Beach. While an urban park this size might often receive a design that has more hard surface than soft, Lincoln Park’s site-specific conditions, context and program elicited a unique response. A decision was made early in the design process for this public space to feel ‘green’ and more like a park.

With West 8 firmly positioned to deliver its mission of a green park, not a plaza, a park that feels intimate, shady, and soft was created; a park that will support the world-class attraction of the New World Symphony Building. Lincoln Park reflects the spirit and vitality of Miami Beach and will support a multitude of day and night uses, either under the shade of the trees or a starlit sky.

Lincoln Park will also have the wonder of some totally unique features that are one of a kind. First, several pergolas embrace the park edges; their shape inspired by the puffy cumulous clouds inherent in South Florida’s tropical climate. The hand-fabricated painted aluminium structures not only provide shade but will support the spectacular blooms of bougainvillea vines; highlighting a threshold of colour at the parks points of entry.

High quality artwork is equally important here, and the projection wall of the adjacent Symphony Hall building is an ideal ‘canvas’ for video projection artists – an emerging and exciting discipline within the art world. West 8 has designed a projection tower and ‘Ballet Bar’ to house the extensive multimedia equipment provided within the park. These elements provide a consistent language among the park’s unique architectural elements, providing a wide range number of possibilities for both local and international artists to present an ever-changing exhibit that would occur outside the confines of a traditional museum experience.

Soft, undulating topography is reinforced visually by a white concrete mosaic of meandering pathways, and white concrete seating walls that providing options for informal seating. These two critical elements of the park design allow Lincoln Park to convey the illusion of a park larger than its humble inherent size. ‘Veils’ of palm and specimen tree planting conceal and reveal views further reinforcing the experience of being within an oasis that is much larger.

Open to the public in January 2011, Lincoln Park is a unified expression of recreation, pleasure and culture. Combined with the momentum of the symphony halls uses and outstanding architecture, the New World Symphony campus will be a world class destination that marries music, design, and experience.

client: City of Miami Beach
design: 2009–2010
realisation: 2010-2011
size: 1 ha.

See also:

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New World Centre by Frank Gehry	BGU University Entrance Square by Chyutin Architects	Nursing Home Garden by Estudio Caballero Colón