In the annals of urban planning and landscape design, the original ‘Emerald Necklace’ is a string of interconnected parks in Boston designed by Fredrick Law Olmsted that link the old Boston Common with Franklin Park, looping around the city. Rickenbacker Park, a new linear park proposed by architect Bernard Zyscovich, could similarly string together a chain of existing parks and green space along the Rickenbacker Causeway, creating an emerald necklace for Miami that would be South Florida’s own version of Olmsted’s great design.
Miami Today put the Malaysian casino conglomerate Genting Group’s situation at the former Miami Herald Building site succinctly when it said that their redevelopment of that property into the Resorts World Miami has been “in a holding pattern for years” since casino plans on stalled. However, there still appears to be life behind the scenes.
Akerman, the largest law firm in Florida, is taking possession of the top seven floors, or 80 percent, of the twelve story Three Brickell City Centre at 98 SW 7th Street, which has just received its temporary certificate of occupancy. This officially makes Three Brickell City Centre the first completed section of the Brickell City Centre megaproject.
The construction crew over at One Thousand Museum, starchitect Zaha Hadid‘s Museum Park-adjacent ultra luxury condo tower, are adding a new floor every couple of weeks, and the building’s rather distinctive form has begun to take shape. Sure it’s a form that has been compared to everything from the awe-inspired, to the benign, and to the unprintable, but the design is really quite innovative.
One Thousand Museum’s prefabricated exoskeleton is being shipped over from Dubai in 4,800 pieces, allegedly saving months in construction, as well as completely opening up floor plates by removing interior load-bearing columns while still preserving expansive exterior glass walls.
According to an article last year on Gizmodo, the exoskeleton was originally designed to be purely cosmetic, but evolved into the essential structural form it is, literally holding up the building from the outside. “DeSimone [the building’s structural engineer] figured out a way to make that decorative exoskeleton part of the building’s structural engineering. They’re made out of hollow precast panels (produced in Dubai) that are then filled with cement when they’re installed. It actually is an exoskeleton, just [as] Hadid’s design implied from the beginning.” The 706 foot tower will have 83 units, with no more than two per floor, and plenty of very extravagant amenities like a rooftop aquatic center and custom interior scenting for the public spaces, also designed by Zaha.
This two-story loft at South-of-Fifth’s very expensive and very boutique Ocean House condominium was “inspired by Danish designer Niels Sorensen” according to the broker’s remarks.
Visualizing urban development patterns by age can reveal a lot about the evolution of a city, historically and up to the present day. To state the obvious, historic preservation is a very hot topic in Miami right now. Miami’s most historic neighborhoods are not coincidentally many of its most popular, presenting a need for preservation, a public desire to preserve what makes those neighborhoods special to begin with, and inherent challenges to that preservation. Cities are also built in very different ways than they were in the past. Greater Miami is, of course, no exception to this rule, although development happens a little differently everywhere. By using data from the Miami-Dade Property appraiser, Gridics has mapped urban development across the entire county by decade constructed in shades of blue, allowing patterns of growth to be seen in the data.
The long-discussed redevelopment of the old Chalks Airlines Miami Seaplane Base on Watson Island is finally moving forward after a rezoning of the southwest corner of Watson Island, where the base currently exists, from its previous zoning as park land. A base in the form of an art deco tower is slated for the site.
Located on Miami Shores’ iconic Grand Concourse, this 3,460 square foot ranch-style house was built in 1964 and has since been well-restored to preserve its swinging ’60s Palm Springs-meets-Miami Beach aesthetic.
A bright, tomato red double door which is something of a local landmark leads to a huge living room with recessed lighting and sliding glass doors that themselves open out to a courtyard with a kidney-shaped pool. Above some fabulous wooden floors (rosewood with ebony boarders) is a broad tray ceiling. A sputnik lamp swings in the dining room, and although the original kitchen no longer exists, the house’s 1960s-era stove has been incorporated into the new cabinetry. The four bedroom, five bath house was listed on December 1st for $1.85 million.
The Related Group’s Auberge Residences, planned for the 1400 block of Biscayne Boulevard, has unveiled its first big batch of renderings to real estate agents, who have waisted no time in sharing them with all their friends/ clients/ impressionable fellow agents on Facebook. According to those agents the project will launch sales in about two weeks, and contains a collection of 2, 3, and 4 bedroom units in one 328 unit, 60-story tower.
