Miami Design District

While the Design Miami fair celebrates its tenth anniversary with a parade of illustrious personalities that go from artist Marini Abramovic to architect Peter Marino – with an exhibition at the Bass Museum of Art curated by Jérôme Sans – the Miami Design District (MDD), whose patron, Mr Craig Robins it shares, continues to expand with ever more ambitious commissions.

With the fair now ten years old, it is also a good moment to take stock of things, even if when it comes to the district, looking back is a means for conjecturing about the future. “Ten years ago the MDD was just a vision, today it has become reality”, highlights building-developer and collector Robins. It all started here: to coincide with the first edition of the design fair, in 2005 Zaha Hadid inaugurated the Moore Building with the installation Elastika, a fluid intervention inside the atrium of the actual building. This then gave way to the continued development of the design district of Miami that since then has never been out of the spotlight.
Zaha Hadid features again this year with the retrospective “Zaha Hadid: Ten Years On/”, while this December the galleries at the Moore Building offer a temporary home to the prestigious institute, ICA Miami – Institute of Contemporary Art with two individual shows dedicated to artists Andra Ursula and Pedro Reyes respectively.

Crossing over the street, we encounter another pioneering past project for the neighbourhood, the Dash Fence by Marc Newson, winner of the Designer of the Future in 2006: a structural installation around the Design and Architecture High School with an undulated appearance that was completed in 2007. To mark this important anniversary, MDD has commissioned projects to a number of top international architects and designers. I found myself in the company of Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto when he saw his completed facade for the first time, part of the pedestrian area at Palm Court. “I received a telephone call from Robins three years ago, I was very excited about the proposal, at the time it was my first building in the US, now I’m building another two in LA – the extension to the Long Beach Art Museum and a private residential building – and one in New York, the interiors of a shop in Brooklyn”.

The Miami project is a two-storey structure in steel and glass that features various different shades of blue, “I wanted to reproduce the Miami sky and portray the notion of transparency that is an obvious reference to water, always so present in this city. I wanted to combine rain and sunshine. I’m pleased with the building, I wanted these arches to create the illusion of walking under a waterfall.” Right in the heart of the small piazza, surrounded by a pool of (real) water, sits a reproduction of the Fly’s Eye Dome by Buckminster Fuller while close by stands the Design District Event Space, a space of over 400 mq dedicated to temporary exhibitions designed by New-York-based architects Aranda/Lasch, a clear homage to what is known as tropical modernism: “It is always the context that inspires the architecture. The decorations on the facade refers to the traditional architecture of the city. This building fully reflects our vision of Miami, a place that allows architecture to be open, for this reason we have built a flexible system of sliding doors in solid wood by Merbau that can disappear completely. America has a bad reputation when it come to public spaces”, explains Benjamin Aranda.

From the building by Aranda/Lasch, a series of escalators lead to the outdoor installation Netscape by Konstantin Grcic, for which the German designer also received an award in 2010. His intervention consists of a series of hammock-like seats made from netting on metal-frames in the form of a six-pointed star, with a second version installed on the magnificent terrace of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), completed last year in Downtown Miami by giants Herzog & de Meuron to house Mr Perez’s personal collection along with temporary exhibitions.

Still in the design district: to celebrate the excellence of their cars (practically made-to-measure) Bentley Motors present the first edition of the series Bentley Elements entitled Light, the work of Italian artist Massimo Uberti. A lighting installation made up of neon tubes blown and assembled directly in Miami reproduces the profile of the car manufacturer’s quality-control section (with desks and chairs), the final stage in the process before the vehicle can leave the factory at Crewe in the UK. Curated by Campbell-Rey, the work represents the marriage between innovation, technology and craftsmanship.

Louis Vuitton have brought to life Playing with Shapes, a design from 1972 by Pierre Paulin conceived for American furniture-giant Herman Miller but never produced: 18 pieces with a modular format that can be arranged in different ways for creating living spaces – the original model, along with preliminary designs and sketches is now part of the collection at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The facade of the JBL Building is the work of the Miami and New-York-based practice K/R, Terry Riley and partner John Keenen. Director of the department of design and architecture at MoMA, then director of the Miami Art museum, he now lives in the Courthouse (inspiration Mies Van der Rohe) a building that he designed “with the sky entering directly into the house” he says. “Robins used this neighbourhood as an open-air laboratory: perhaps this kind of experiment could only happen here.
In 2006, there was only one restaurant, Michael’s Genuine. Now it’s completely different, lots of people want to live here; it reminds me of SoHo in New York a few years ago. The combination of significant economic investment, proposals with high-standards of curatorship and passion has meant that MDD has brought cultural enrichment to the whole of Miami”, adds Riley.

Ten years ago, it seemed a dream that creative investment and strongly art-led interventions would be able to completely transform this urban ara. The basic idea was to create an open-air mall (an exception in the US), offer public art, creativity and culture, an invitation to stroll amid big names, site-specific projects and high-end gastronomy. In just over a decade, MDD has managed to bring in most of the world’s leading luxury design brands (with 120 shops planned for the forthcoming year, half already open), making this street across the bridge from Miami Beach an unmissable destination for the city, the United States and the global system of contemporary culture.

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