Jean Nouvel’s Monad Terrace Will be a Beautiful ‘Reflection Machine’ of Miami’s Watery Future

May 13, 2016

Rendering of Monad Terrace by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel.

There’s a certain incredible seductiveness to a sunken Miami, a combination Venice and Atlantis bobbing away in the ocean, out beyond the Florida coastline of the future. “The image is post-apocalyptical, foreshadowing an uncertain future yet, somehow, utopian and hopeful. It appears to be the end of the day, the end of a season, the end of an era, with the sun setting wildly over the skyline of downtown Miami.” says renowned architecture critic and Miamian Alastair Gordon of Jean Nouvel’s design for the luxurious boutique Monad Terrace condominium being developed by JDS Development in Miami Beach that both interprets and sharpens that vision.

It’s a future that almost unites with the past: “The architect appears to be seeking a kind of unity of purpose and compromise between future and past, an imaginary realm of wild sunsets, mating manatees and tangled mangrove roots before the coming of Flagler, Fisher or the Kardashians. A 70,720-square-foot slice of Eden, rebooted.”

The design was enthusiastically approved by Miami Beach’s Design Review Board last week. They say Miami is drowning and doomed, but after reading Gordon’s review in the Miami Herald you might not think so anymore. Perhaps Miami is just changing yet again, and maybe even for the better.