At its May 3rd meeting, the city’s Design Review Board unanimously approved the Miami Beach Art in Public Places committee’s recommendations of six site-specific art installations by six international artists selected out of over five hundred submissions, to grace the renovated Miami Beach Convention Center. Here they are.
The Juan Sebastian de Elcano. Photos by Lucas Lechuga.
A very historic bit of the Spanish Armada sailed into the Port of Miami yesterday, making its birth at the FEC slip in Museum Park. The Juan Sebastian de Elcano, an elegant four-masted training tall ship of the Spanish Navy, is on a four month voyage across the Atlantic to the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. Having just arrived from Havana she (does one still use the female pronoun when referring to a ship named after a man?) will be in Miami until Sunday for free tours, and as a cultural exchange between Spain and the six ports-of-call on her American tour, at least a few of which coincidentally are former Spanish colonies. Built in 1927 the ship is named after the man who completed Ferdinand Magellan’s around-the-world expedition after explorer’s death with the last remaining of Magellan’s five ships, the Victoria. She also, incredibly, has the distinction of having sailed farther than any other sailboat in the world today, approximately 2.3 million nautical miles.
‘The Living Room.’ Photo by Phillip Pessar.
This may look like a post-apocalyptic shell of something in the Design District, but it’s actually an iconic but very mucked up sculpture known as ‘The Living Room’ created by artist duo Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt. Doubling as the entrance to a furniture showroom, ‘The Living Room’ was oversized and adorable, with tangerine orange floral wallpaper, a drapey curtain, a bright lipstick red couch, and even a window that when looked at it in the right way played a clever trick of scale and perspective. The showroom has long gone, but the sculpture itself is still there, under layers of spray paint, signage, and dirt. Although The Living Room has been on the market for a while, it is now being offered by Metro One Properties as part of an assemblage of lots that make up over an acre of land for $37.5 million.
‘The Living Room’ by Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt. Photo v ia R & R Studios.
Miami Line Lighting Phase I. Photo by Lucas Lechuga.
The Miami Line, a rainbow neon strip running along the Metrorail’s Miami River bridge which was for years an iconic part of the Miami nighttime skyline, has been partially re-lit in LED lights, after going dark a few years ago. Light artist Rockne Krebs created it when the Metrorail first opened in 1984, and it proved so popular that over the years The Miami Line has appeared in everything from Miami Vice to postcards of Miami, says the Miami New Times, which recently explored the history of the piece. Due to the delicacy of the neon tube medium, and the frequency and difficulty of repairs the pieced needed over the years, in 2013 the county’s Art in Public Places program said they would convert it to much more durable LED. Although completion was slated by 2014, it didn’t happen until 2016, and about 1,390 feet of the sculpture remains in the dark. According to Troy Taylor, VP of the Riverfront Master Association, the rest is hopefully coming in two future phases that have yet to be budgeted. As of now, however, the line goes halfway across the Miami River, then basically stops.
Hyde Midtown. All photos by Lucas Lechuga.
Construction at Midtown Miami is heating up, with one tower already topped off, another looking close, and a third well off the ground. Midtown 36, a residential tower with a considerable amount of ground floor retail and gallery space has topped off, while Midtown 5, which is planned to be a rental apartment tower (and thus not much info has been released) looks like it’s nearing or at top off. Finally, fresh off of having sold the hotel portion of Hyde Midtown, construction is zipping along. We thought we saw a recent announcement about the sales center closing in 90 days, but a search came up empty, so that may or may not be happening. Oh well. And then of course there’s the Midtown Walmart, a source of so much drama. Having broken ground back in January, after five months it’s still not looking like much.
Martone Bicycles on display at Maison & Objet.
Maison & Objet, the preeminent French interior design, decor, decoration, and architectural fair is back in Miami for the second annual incarnation of Maison & Objet Americas, its American edition based in Miami. This time around, the fair has begun to settle in to its permanent American home and grow, taking up double the hall space in the Miami Beach Convention Center, sustaining more satellite exhibitions, events, and parties, and and letting embracing Miami and Miami Beach more than ever. (Last year I explored the fair for Curbed Miami) The fair began today and runs through Friday, with the center of activity being the convention center, but plenty to see in the Design District, Wynwood, and around South Beach. But before all that, here’s a first look at some of the design and decor inside the main show.
A Miami AirBnB
Miami is AirBnB’s fifth largest market in the U.S. The short-term home rental app is killing it down here, where hundreds, possibly thousands of small South Beach apartments are rented out on a nightly basis to tourists from across the world. It’s not just the beach that’s raking in the dollars though. “Miami is one of our largest U.S. markets and certainly a broader part of our strategy,” Christopher Nully, a spokesperson for Airbnb, told The Real Deal, which took a deeper look into the future of the company’s presence in Miami. “We really see increased growth in the market, but not just along the beach.” And this is all happening despite a patchy legal landscape, where short term rentals are allowed to varying degrees in various South Florida municipalities, and enforcement is highly uneven.
So, is the AirBnB landscape really as much like the Wild West as it sounds? Well, kind of yeah. It’s a system so unstreamlined that “I’m not sure anyone knows how to deal with it,” said Joe Hernandez, head of the real estate group at Weiss Serota also told Real Deal. Meanwhile, the hotel industry feels “under attack,” as Russell Galbut, partner in hotels such as the Gale, and the Shelborne, said while at a panel recently.
Babylon Apartments. Photo by Phillip Pessar.
The City of Miami’s historic preservation board voted Tuesday evening to block demolition of the iconic Babylon Apartments on Brickell Bay Drive, which is one of architecture firm Arquitectonica’s very first buildings and one of its most iconic. Although the owner, Francisco “Paco” Martinez, who once stared in old spaghetti western movies under the name George Martin, was able to get the City of Miami to condemn the structure, the preservation board unanimously voted to consider preservation a day before Paco was to get his demolition permit. This places a 120 day moratorium on demolition, giving city staff time to further consider the historic importance of the building.
Since its age falls significantly short of the standard 50-year cutoff for historic preservation, the structure must meet a higher bar of “exceptional importance” to warrant historic designation. (It was designed in 1979 and completed in 1982) Preservationists, however, argue that is exactly what it is. “Few dispute the architectural originality of the small Brickell apartment building, distinguished by its vivid red, ziggurat-shaped face, its key role in shaping the redevelopment of Brickell as an urban residential district in the 1980s, or its role in gaining a worldwide rep for the young Arquitectonica.” writes Andres Viglucci in the Miami Herald. Meanwhile, prominent historian Arva Moore Parks calls the Babylon “truly an iconic building.” The Babylon stands among the Atlantis, the Pink House, and the Palace Condominium, as Arquitectonica’s most iconic early buildings, which themselves set the stylistic tone for Miami in the ’80s.
Photo via Chris Goldberg/Flickr
Yesterday Uber and Lyft were both legalized in Miami-Dade County, following years of legal wrangling and a county commission vote of 9-2 strongly in their favor. The law allowing Uber and Lyft on the roads officially will take ten days to go into effect, but for taxi companies the fight isn’t over yet. In a last ditch effort, they have sued Miami-Dade County for $1 billion in lost medallion values. Is the county worried? Apparently, not really. Similar legal action in New York was unsuccessful. “We can’t be held hostage,” Mayor Gimenez told the Miami Herald Tuesday evening. “That was something they were hanging over our heads for a long time, to scare us. There’s been legal action around the country. We’ll take that on, too.”
