Hasta La Ideas

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

“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.”

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).

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.”

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.”

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

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to regenerating Miami Design District” appeared first on Dezeen.

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.

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 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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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“laid out as a pedestrian city” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie from Miami, show director Marianne Goebl discusses the trends that emerged from Design Miami 2013, including a renewed focus on female designers such as Charlotte Perriand and Maria Pergay. 

Design Miami 2013, which took place in Miami from 4 to 8 December alongside the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair, featured a large number of vintage furniture pieces by iconic 20th-century designers.

“Design Miami’s intention is to offer a journey through design history,” Goebl explains in the movie. “At the same time we present a strong pillar of contemporary experimental work.”

One of the standout pieces on show this year was a one-room prefabricated house designed by French modernist architect Jean Prouvé, which was on sale for $2.5 million.

“For the first time we have a full-scale architectural structure [at the show], which Jean Prouvé designed in 1945,” Goebl explains.

Prouvé was well-represented throughout the show, but so was the late architect’s frequent collaborator Charlotte Perriand.

“It’s also a year of seminal women designers,” says Goebl. “We have a solo show on Charlotte Perriand, where you can discover an interior that she designed in Paris for the Borot family.”

She continues: “We also have an interior dedicated to Maria Pergay’s furniture made from stainless steel from the 1970s.”

Other pieces of vintage furniture included Soviet art deco furniture presented by Moscow’s Heritage International Art Gallery.

“For the first time an exhibitor from Russia is showing some kind of propaganda furniture that was designed in the 1930s to 1950s,” Goebl explains.

Goebl then goes on to discuss the work of contemporary designers on show, claiming that there is a growing trend towards merging digital and analogue experiences.

“There’s a field that is not categorised yet,” she says. “For example, Maarten Baas‘ Grandfather and Grandmother clocks, or the Clock Clocks by Human Since 1982.”

Goebl claims that the collectible design market has now fully recovered after a few rocky years during the recent financial crash.

“The market had been affected by the crisis in 2008 and 2009,” she says. “But since 2010 we’ve really registered a continued, healthy growth.”

We drove around 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.

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designers” says Design Miami director appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our first movie from Miami, Jacques Herzog of Herzog & de Meuron claims the Swiss architecture studio is trying to create a “new vernacular for Miami” that eschews sealed, air-conditioned buildings in favour of more “transparent or permeable” structures.

“Very often, if you go to a place, you’re asked to do architecture that relates to that place, stylistically, or typologically or whatever,” says Herzog, who was speaking at the press preview of the new Pérez Art Museum in downtown Miami, which opened on Wednesday. “What would that be in Miami?”

“The most famous style or vernacular here is the art deco [buildings] on Ocean Drive, but this is relatively stupid architecture; it is just blind boxes, which have a certain decoration, like a cake or pastry, with air conditioning that makes a very strict difference between inside and outside.”

He continues: “This is very North American architecture that doesn’t relate to or exploit the amazing conditions that you find here: the amazing climate, the lush vegetation, the seaside, the sun. We wanted to do buildings deconstructing this, opening up these structures and making them transparent or permeable.”

Herzog gives the example of 1111 Lincoln Road, Herzog & de Meuron’s sculptural car park on South Beach, which was completed in 2010 and is open to the elements on all sides.

As well as providing parking spaces for 300 cars, the car park includes shops, bars and restaurants and hosts parties, weddings and other events throughout the year.

“It’s just a stupid garage,” he says. “But the new thing is that we made the building double height so it opens the possibility to have different floor heights and different rooms.”

“Parking cars [in this building] is an experience. We introduced shops and restaurants and little bars and other possibilities for people to hang out and use the entire building, not just to make a blind box for cars.”

Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern in London and Parrish Art Museum on Long Island are two other examples of galleries that “give right answers to different places”, Herzog says.

“I compare it to cooking,” he explains. “We try to use what is available in every season or in a certain region and not to try to have an ambition to do something exquisite in a place where it wouldn’t make sense, but to fully exploit whatever is there.”

The Pérez Art Museum features large, over-hanging eaves to provide shelter from the sun and rain of Miami’s tropical climate, while suspended columns covered in vertical gardens by botanist Patrick Blanc hang from the roof to emphasise the building’s relationship to its surroundings.

“I think this museum is an interesting attempt [to exploit the natural climate in Miami],” Herzog says. “Somehow it introduces a type of building that could become a new vernacular for Miami.”

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

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stupid architecture” in Miami appeared first on Dezeen.