Hasta La Ideas

News: football star David Beckham has unveiled proposals to build a 25,000-seat stadium for his new Major League Soccer (MLS) team on the waterfront in Miami.

Designed by Miami firms Arquitectonica and 360 Architecture, the bowl-shaped stadium is planned for a 14.5-hectare site in PortMiami, home to the world’s busiest cruise ship terminal, and would offer spectators an impressive view of the Downtown Miami skyline.

“When people think of Miami, they immediately think about being near or on the water. I asked my team to develop ideas for a stadium that embraces the best of the destination,” said Beckham in a statement.

The former Manchester United and LA Galaxy footballer, who retired as a player last May, will fund the stadium privately. He also plans to open a series of accompanying facilities that would include shops, restaurants, a nightclub, an outdoor screening venue and a possible football museum.

If Miami-Dade county agrees to give the site to Beckham, the building could be up and running as soon as 2018.

According to Beckham’s real estate advisor John Alschuler, a bridge would also be added to connect the site with the mainland.

“The port of Miami is the right place because it will create a great stadium, it will energise downtown, it will create jobs and economic value,” he said.

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proposal for Miami port appeared first on Dezeen.

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: French botanist Patrick Blanc, the inventor of green walls, explains how he created the hanging gardens on the outside of Herzog & de Meuron‘s new Pérez Art Museum in our next movie from Miami.

The new Pérez Art Museum Miami by Herzog & de Meuron, which opened last month, features clusters of columns covered with plants suspended from the building’s large overhanging roof.

Blanc explains that the Swiss architects approached him to create these vertical gardens after they successfully worked together on the CaixaForum arts centre in Madrid, completed in 2008.

“We had already covered a wall totally with plants in Madrid,” says Blanc. “Here, for the museum, they asked me: ‘Do you think it’s possible to have the plants on columns instead?’ I said: ‘Yes, of course.'”

Unlike a green wall, which faces in one direction, Blanc had to use different types of plants on each side of the hanging columns.

“For the outside surface, facing the sea, [the plants] have to face full sun, they have to face strong winds, sometimes salt and sometimes hurricanes,” he says. “The side facing the museum is very dark, so [I used] shade-loving plants.”

Blanc claims the key to creating a successful vertical garden is the diversity of species used.

“I use many, many different species,” he explains. “Here, in Miami, I used 80 different species. Sometimes, I use up to 400. When you have so many species, it looks much more natural.”

Vertical gardens are more than just aesthetically pleasing, Blanc goes on to claim.

“Because the roots are growing on the surface, [rather than into the ground], all of the micro-organisms associated with the roots are totally in contact with the air, [which is important] for de-pollution,” he says, “Also, you have benefits of insulation.”

He continues: “And, of course, the target it to use water collected from the roof. With a horizontal garden you lose a lot of water through percolation in the soil. You only have useful water when you have a vertical garden.”

Blanc believes that vertical gardens have become so popular because they provide an interesting and space-efficient way of introducing greenery into cities and claims he doesn’t mind that so many other people have taken on his idea.

“You use vertical space and usually it is empty space,” he says. “I think that is why they have been such a big success.” “Everybody in the world is doing vertical gardens. Of course, 20-25 years ago, I was the only one. But I am happy because with this idea I created a new vision of the interaction between human beings, the town and plants.”

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.

The post Patrick Blanc’s vertical gardens at
Pérez Art Museum create “living walls” appeared first on Dezeen.

There are over 16 million noted colors and artists have long sought to capture several—if not most—of them. Even Pantone’s GEO system is composed of 2,058 new solid colors….

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