Photos by Sean McCaughan
After being closed to the public for significantly longer than a decade, Vizcaya Museum & Gardens has reopened its marine garden, the historic linkage between the formal gardens to the north and the more informal, lagoon gardens to the south which are now gone. The restoration of the marine garden has just begun, but giving renewed access to the public can only help efforts to bring it back to the way it was.
Icon Brickell Pool
The Icon Brickell Master Association sent out a letter to ‘All Association Members,’ meaning every owner in the three-towered colossus, to lay out how much each is expected to pay, broken down per unit, for the repair and replacement of Icon Brickell’s poorly constructed pool. The cost of the entire $14 million project is being split up among the development’s 1,718 total units, the newly rebranded W Hotel, and even (from the looks of it) the restaurants, proportional to each owner’s percentage ownership of the development. This breaks down the amount of the special assessment to thousands of dollars for a typical unit, but not tens of thousands. Reasonable? The association is set to vote on the special assessment on 14th.
Photo via Flickr Creative Commons/ El Gringo
Heineken is donating $20,000 and crowdfunding another $80,000 to remove the seats in the architecturally iconic Miami Marine Stadium, initiating what will hopefully be the first step in its restoration, reports the Miami New Times. The City of Miami Commission is expected to approve a measure accepting the funds tomorrow, and the campaign, which is kicking off Heineken’s “Cities” Campaign, will be launched on Indiegogo next month. If this works, it could finally mean the beginning of a restoration that has seen years of false starts despite the tireless work of locals like activist Don Worth and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “Whoever loves the stadium will be able to give $5 to bring it back to life. For so long, people have been like, ‘We need to find huge gifts from major donors,’ so this is different in that it’s allowing residents directly to bring it back to life, and that’s something that doesn’t happen with a lot of restoration projects.” said Jason Lloyd Clement, director of community outreach at the National Trust. The cost of the hoped for full restoration, between $37 million and $40 million, is still to be addressed.
According to the broker’s remarks, this large family home at 4020 Kiaora Street in Coral Gables, is “Hamptons inspired.” The $10.9 million spread is mostly traditional, with white clapboard siding and vaulted, gabled ceilings, which are all nice and Hamptons-y. It mixes things up a bit with a few touches that are sort of modern or post-modern, or something, like a clerestory set of apertures (would ‘triangular archways’ be an oxymoron?) above the large back porch. Yet it does seem to work. All in all, not a bad package.
Former Portman proposal for Miami Beach Convention Center Hotel
The timeline for the proposed Miami Beach Convention Center Hotel has more than likely been delayed by a substantial amount of time due to the indecisiveness of a Blue Ribbon panel set up to address the issue by Mayor Philip Levine. The convention hotel was meant to accompany the new convention center, which is currently under construction.
According to the Real Deal, the commission “did not reach any agreement late Monday on where any new hotel should be built, how many rooms it should contain, how tall it should be and whether or not it should incorporate the Fillmore Miami Beach at the Jackie Gleason Theater into its design.” which means they made pretty much zero progress, and because a voter ballot measure is required, and that ballot measure has to be written by August to make it into the November ballot, it’s “highly unlikely” that’s going to happen. As you may remember, the last time the hotel was on the ballot, with a gigantic and rather blah design, it was defeated (I once wrote on Curbed Miami the design looked “like a bad copy of the Fountainebleau, on steroids”). In response, Jack Portman, the only developer who was willing to take on the City of Miami Beach’s frustrating inaction on this issue is still sticking around. Portman, his company, has been the only bidder for the hotel in a while. “I think he just sit tight” Mr. Portman said, showing that by now he should probably be considered a minor saint.
All Aboard Florida has not canceled the ‘supertower’ at its Downtown MiamiCentral terminal and is planning another development, possibly another ‘supertower’ next door, according to somebody involved with the project. The second tower would go on the block to the south, which is being enlarged by rerouting an adjacent street. According to The Next Miami, the new tower will be a 750 room hotel, making it the largest in the City of Miami, although our source was unable to confirm or deny this. Meanwhile, although construction on either tower has not begun yet, they are seriously hustling on the rest of the terminal megaproject.
Vizcaya Marine Garden.
Closed more than ten years ago due to hurricane damage, the fabulous marine garden and peacock bridge at Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, the former estate of International Harvester tycoon James Dearing, are reopening tomorrow. There will be an event for members in the evening, before opening to the public on Wednesday (the museum and gardens are closed on Tuesdays). An original piece of the Vizcaya estate, the space incorporates a large aquarium-like canal that connects to the canal running underneath a high oriental-inspired bridge known as the ‘peacock bridge’ and to Biscayne Bay.
Hidden for years behind a locked, foliage-covered gate (and a gorgeous sarcophagus), the garden and bridge extend south from the circular rose garden with its large fountain and ends abruptly at the grounds of Immaculata-La Salle High School and Mercy Hospital. This jewel of Vizcaya with its aquatic fantasyland that would practically invite visitors on an escapade under the sea also exposes the museum’s deepest scar.
Before its closer to the public, visitors would climb up the ornate bridge and from the top face head-on an unsightly high school and hospital campus built over the remains of the rest of Vizcaya’s huge gardens that included canals, lakes, bridges, architectural follies, a boathouse, tennis courts, a ‘casbah’ (the casbah actually still survives behind the high school’s sports fields and is probably a favorite necking spot with students), and untold other wonders. And leading to all of that they would see directly before them the ruined remains of an aquarium-canal matching the one they had just walked through. These magnificent outer gardens were easily twice the size of all of the gardens which remain at Vizcaya. Handed over to the Archdiocese of Miami by the Dearing heirs, who honestly never really knew what to do with it, this was Vizcaya’s real marine garden. The happy reopening of the little marine garden tomorrow is only a taste of what lies buried and forgotten beyond.
Vintage postcard showing the former marine gardens of Vizcaya.
Vizcaya Gardens circa 1930.
Grove at Grand Bay. Photo by Sean McCaughan.
Who can remember cruising down Brickell Avenue when they were kids, or at least with their kids, and looking for ‘the building with the hole in it?’ Because of how unusual a hole in a building was, and its feature role in the opening credits of Miami Vice, the Atlantis Condominiums designed by Arquitectonica reached worldwide iconic status. Flying around Grove at Grand Bay by drone, designed by Bjarke Ingels, it’s obvious that this pair of buildings may achieve the same fame with their own architectural trick. They twist, and it’s fantastic.
Grove at Grand Bay is only a few months away from completion. The last unit still available is the massive penthouse in the south tower, with six bedrooms, a spa, private pool, wine room, library, media room, two home offices, study, etc. etc. It’s listed for $25 million.
Former Gulf American/INS Building. Photo courtesy BrettHufziger.com.
The old INS Building, originally known as the Gulf American Building and an under-appreciated midcentury modern icon just outside the boundary of the Biscayne Boulevard MiMo District, is losing its signature anodized aluminum sun shades. Photographer Brett Hufgizer (see more at BrettHufziger.com) noticed construction workers removing the distinctive architectural elements from the facade yesterday. The building (historic photo below) originally had a glassed-in lobby and distinctive rooftop news ticker. As I once pointed out on Curbed Miami, the screens were used to shade the building’s windows from the direct light of the sun, in the days before solar tinting. They doubled as a place for architectural display. At the very top was a funky ‘GA’ logo. Plans are for the structure to be gutted to its shell and remade into the Triton Center, a mixed-use residential, commercial, and hotel project, with metal panels that ‘highlight’ to some extent elements of the original building’s design, by architecture firm ADD Inc. (update: the hotel will be a Hilton Garden Inn) Meanwhile the shades need a last minute salvation. If the sun shades can’t be saved in the ‘new’ building, maybe somebody can find use for them somewhere else.
