Some of Miami’s biggest new condo towers are being planned with well-heeled, worldly families in mind, with larger units, more amenities for the kids, and ‘service suits’ to stash the live-in nanny. A few incorporate a theme park’s worth of diversions (think of the soccer field, boxing ring, and jam studio at Paramount Miami Worldcenter or the mini water park, indoor/outdoor playrooms, kid’s gymnasium, and rooftop theater of 1010 Brickell, both under construction) while developers of other buildings are focusing on really tricked-out and designed-up playrooms.
Construction of the majority of City Place Doral, the mixed-use retail and residential development being jointly built by the Related and Shoma Groups, has topped off according to the developers, and is on schedule for completion by the fourth quarter of this year. This encompasses the Flats at City Place Doral, a pair of long apartment blocks lining Main Street City Place, as well as 600,000 square feet of restaurants and retail, or enough to fill three Cocowalks.
Just as the condo market begins to soften, construction in and around Miami’s urban core is continuing at a pace not seen since the crash of 2008 and the Great Recession ground everything to halt, with lots of buildings well underway or just breaking ground. Photographer Phillip Pessar surveys the damage.
Last weekend, 550 truckloads of concrete was pumped into the foundations of the Florida East Coast Railway’s future MiamiCentral Downtown Miami passenger train terminal, where Brightline trains will whiz in and out of Downtown on elevated viaducts.
Paramount Miami Worldcenter, and the Mall at Miami Worldcenter, two of the key components of the multi-billion dollar Miami Worldcenter megaproject, held a joint groundbreaking ceremony today in Downtown Miami. The affair was likely the biggest ground breaking ceremony of this real estate cycle, and perhaps even in all of Miami’s history. The project itself (Paramount and the Mall are linked in one gigantic building) actually began work late last year.
Art collector Gary Nader has been in talks with Miami-Dade College to take over their prime Biscayne Boulevard-facing land on which he wants to build a museum to house his world-renowned Latin American art collection, a hotel, facilities for the college, a theater, a sculpture garden, and two luxury residential towers where units will be designed with art collectors in mind Mr. Nader has just revealed to Miami Modern Luxury Magazine that the 1,600 seat theater is being designed by the great Emilio Estefan.
When Coral Gables’ city founder and developer George Merrick built his ‘master suburb’ he also commissioned notable architects to design seven themed villages within it, to encourage architectural variety within the city which was until then predominantly (and would continue to be) Mediterranean Revival in character. The styles of the villages spanned the globe, from multiple varieties of French to Chinese.
Photographer Andrew John Sweet was a boy from Miami who returned home after receiving his MFA to capture Miami Beach’s fading, but still vibrant old world Jewish culture of the late 1970s and early ’80s, from the unrestored art deco apartment buildings full of retirees that proliferated around South Beach, to the big hotels and their snowbirds up the beach.
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.
The Residences by Armani Casa, which is already over half reserved, has just unveiled its brand-spanking-new $10 million sales center complete with a duplicate of the $1 billion project’s best penthouse (which itself is on sale for $15 million).
