Hadid condo could reshape downtown Miami skyline

The world’s only female superstar architect, Zaha Hadid, unveiled an undulating, spider-like design for a new luxury condo tower on Biscayne Boulevard — her first residential project in the United States — that boldly looks to raise the design ante for Miami’s skyline. The developers of the proposed 1000 Museum, Gregg Covin and Louis Birdman, also hope to capitalize on the location and the big design name to break through the price ceiling for a downtown Miami condo. They are angling for a stratospheric minimum of $4 million for the cheapest units, and a Miami Beach-like $30 million and up for penthouses. That means pricing would start at about $900 per square foot, an amount that’s already roughly double the price of the typical new downtown condo. The 61-story tower would squeeze in among the so-called Four Horsemen high-rise condos across from Biscayne Bay and the emergent Museum Park, taking over a prime spot now occupied by a gas station, which Covin and Birdman have a contract to buy. The pawn shop property behind it on Northeast Second Avenue is not, for now, part of the $300 million project. The futuristic design by Hadid’s London-based firm features an interlacing concrete exoskeleton, a bulging midsection and a set of rib-like lower balconies that has prompted comparisons by some local bloggers to a spider, a bug and an alien spaceship. “We love Miami, and we feel we can create a beautiful addition to the skyline that will define the skyline in a new way,’’ Zaha Hadid Architects director Patrik Schumacher said. “I think it will have a new kind of appeal.’’ The Iraqi-born, London-schooled Hadid, whose firm has also designed a swooping new Miami Beach city parking garage, is known for flowing, curvaceous buildings that sometimes appear to melt. In the past decade, she has gone from experimental-minded iconoclast to sought-after designer, achieving the kind of popular recognition usually reserved for celebrity male architects like Frank Gehry. Her well-publicized struggles to be taken seriously in the notoriously male-dominated profession also made her a kind of feminist icon. She has a residence on South Beach and was known to have long been seeking a signature local project. Previously, her only Miami work was a sculptural installation in the atrium of a Design District building. Hadid is the third winner of the Pritzker Prize, often called architecture’s Nobel, currently working on a Miami condo project. Sir Norman Foster of Britain is designing a tower next to the Saxony Hotel in Miami Beach, while the Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron, also responsible for the new downtown art museum and the instantly famed 1111 Lincoln Road parking garage on South Beach, is designing a tower in Sunny Isles Beach. The firm of a fourth Pritzker laureate, Rem Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture, for whom Hadid previously worked, has designed three companion buildings for the Saxony project, including the renovation of a smaller hotel, and is on a team vying for the redevelopment of the Miami Beach Convention Center. The fact that Hadid and other eminent architects are designing exceptional buildings in Miami reflects a growing maturity and sophistication about design from developers and civic institutions, said Wolfsonian/FIU museum director Cathy Leff. It also means the city can finally lay aside its longstanding inferiority complex, she hinted. “It’s a sign of confidence in our present,’’ Leff, a Hadid friend, said. “We were always the city of the future. We no longer have to define ourselves that way. We are a city of now and it should be defined by the best designers.’’ Hadid’s hiring for the 1000 Museum tower had been previously announced, but Friday provided the first public look at her firm’s design. Such is the interest among followers of design that leaked images and commentary had already been posted on local blogs. Schumacher said putting the structural support on the tower’s exterior and varying its width not only creates a striking appearance, but also has the practical benefit of allowing roomier units in the tower, which is relatively slender because of the lot’s small footprint. “It’s good to have the structure on the outside,’’ Schumacher said. “It’s a fusion of technical issues and technical expression, of aesthetic expression. It gives an identity ot the project, which changes character as you move from the bottom to the middle to the top. It adds variety, rather than have endless, monotonous repetition of the same from the bottom to the top.’’ That last is, of course, a reference to the typical stacked-balconies-on-a-podium design of Miami condo towers, including 1000 Museum’s four companions, all by noted Miami architects. Ten Museum, next door to the planned new tower, was also developed by Covin. But the developers and their architects deliberately set out to shatter that mold, Schumacher said. Although the tower does sit on a multi-level garage, retail and amenities podium, the exoskeleton’s legs reach all the way to the bottom, tying the building to the street, Schumacher said. Designed under the city’s new Miami 21 code, the tower also will avoid some of the much-cricitized pitfalls of its four companions, built under a previous code, he said. Critics have compared their rear facades on Northwest Second, dedicated entirely to service facilities, to the back of a refrigerator. 1000 Museum, by contrast, “will have a nice presence all around,’’ Schumacher promised. “It doesn’t have a back side.’’ He said the building would be “pushed forward’’ on the lot to urbanely meet Biscayne Boulevard and the planned new park across the street, where new art and science museums are under construction.
The 700-foot tower would be the tallest of the ensemble facing the park. Like most recently announced high-rise residential projects, the 1000 Museum developers are aiming the project at the very top of the luxury market, which means principally foreign buyers with ready cash. The units would be large, between 4,500 square feet and 9,000 square feet.

  Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/03/18/v-fullstory/3292714/hadid-condo-could-reshape-downtown.html BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI aviglucci@MiamiHerald.com