Development

There’s no question that Miami’s housing market is booming. But these days, instead of sprawling outward, developers are looking for creative ways to reinvent the city’s existing urban areas. On tiny Allison Island, wedged in the Indian Creek Waterway just off Miami Beach, the most unusual residential development in Miami’s recent history is nearing completion.

Aqua, a 151-unit development, sits on a narrow, 8.5-acre site on the southern portion of Allison Island. Its developer, Craig Robins, had a rare vision to combine elegantly simple Modernist architecture—often criticized for not paying enough attention to the surrounding context—and the traditional, contextual town planning principles of New Urbanism—often assumed to be compatible only with styles that mimic pre-World War II urban architecture. Many are skeptical that these two often-conflicting movements could be successfully integrated, but the conditions in Miami may be just right for Robins’s experiment.

The Condo Craze: Casting Shadows on the Water

Miami’s growth is driven by population expansion and shaped by geographic constriction. These days, there’s almost nowhere left to sprawl: with the Atlantic Ocean to the east and Everglades National Park to the south and west, South Florida is running out of land. As a result, many developers are building dense, high-rise infill in downtown Miami and Miami Beach.

Daily, construction cranes add new pieces to the mosaic of concrete and glass that makes up the city’s skyline. There has been almost $60 billion in real estate sales in the past year in South Florida, nearly double that of ten years ago. Low interest rates, reluctance to invest capital solely in stocks, and international market conditions are fueling a condominium craze which has an estimated thirty- to fifty- thousand new units projected to come online over the next four years.

Aqua sits in the shadow of these thirty-story skyscrapers, popularly called “Condo Canyon.” To its west, however, lie posh, single-family homes. As a result, political pressure had previously killed two high-rise infill proposals for the site. Zoning laws compounded the difficulty: formerly home to St. Francis Hospital, the entire parcel was designated for solely medical use.

A Twist on Miami’s Real Estate Legacies

Given these restrictions, Robins was able to purchase the site for a mere $12 million—a real steal in a city where land is scarce and a single vacant acre can cost millions. He was hopeful that his past success and the strength of his proposal would convince city officials to change zoning requirements.

Certainly, Robins’s reputation gave substantial weight to the project. Miami is home to several national real estate development companies, and most of the larger fortunes in the region were made in this business. But Robins, a real estate heir, stood out: he was instrumental in transforming not only South Beach but also the Design District (north of downtown and directly across Biscayne Bay from Miami Beach). His real estate company, Dacra, continues to rehabilitate historic structures in South Beach and owns 40 percent of the buildings in the Design District.

The strength of Robins’s proposal was also persuasive. He employed a high-profile firm, DPZ, to design Aqua’s site plan. Based in Miami, DPZ’s name is virtually synonymous with New Urbanism, and its principals, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, designed renowned developments like Seaside and Kentlands. Instead of high-rises, DPZ proposed for Aqua a mix of low- and mid-rise buildings, creating a ziggurat of height and density with 3 eleven-story mid-rise apartment buildings and 49 three- and four-story town homes. The city granted a zoning change for this new proposal, but with two limitations: Dacra had to substantially reduce the number of apartments and had to limit retail to a small “neighborhood store.”

“Our community is fairly sophisticated,” says Jorge Gomez, Miami Beach’s Director of Planning. “DPZ provided a proposal for something different … and the developer was someone with a reputation in the community, who has done good work in historic preservation, who sits on the board of several charitable foundations. That allowed people to take his ideas at face value.”

Having hired the most famous name in New Urbanism to design the grid, Robins commissioned ten modernist architects to design new buildings and adapt existing ones. Architect Walter Chatham, for instance, adapted the hospital’s massive parking garage for resident parking, business center, neighborhood store, play room, gym, two pools, and four stories of apartments. Balconies and decorative elements reduce the visual impact of the once-monolithic structure. One of the mid-rise buildings was designed by Alexander Gorlin, an architect who had already dabbled at the confluence of New Urbanist design and a modernist style when he used an alternative reading of DPZ’s planning code to build himself a modernist residence at Seaside.

Aqua also features two public art installations: a 100 ft by 150 ft tile mural by Richard Tuttle surrounding one of the pools, and a ceramic sculpture by Guillermo Kuitca in a small public square. These commissions reflect Miami’s ever-growing appreciation for art: the city has of late become the darling of the international art crowd, with new museums and galleries, a $350 million Performing Arts Center, and international festivals like Art Basel.

Divorcing Style from Ideology

In terms of generating media “buzz,” Aqua is a success: The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Blueprint, Dwell, Financial Times, and Newsweek have all lauded its development.

Yet some still see Aqua as an attempt to reconcile two irreconcilable movements. Despite their successes in planning, New Urbanists are often criticized for overly “traditional” architecture. Developments like Seaside have been used as backdrops to convey creepy homogeneity in movies like The Truman Show. Modernists, on the other hand, are often credited with great architecture, but accused of poor planning.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk wrote in Suburban Nation that “traditional neighborhood design has little or nothing to do with the issue of architectural style.” Despite this distinction by two of the movement’s leaders, architect Gorlin explains that for most people “somehow, the style got mixed up with the ideology.” He feels that people have failed to distinguish between “what is urbanism and what is style,” and he cites areas in Tel Aviv and the Rue Mallet Stevens in Paris—antecedents of Aqua’s modern architecture and tight urban grid—where “as long as you have strict guidelines for heights and street wall you can have anything built within those guidelines.”

New Urbanist Gated Communities?

Heights and street walls are important in New Urbanism, but are only a part of the template. Traditional Neighborhood Design, the major principle of New Urbanism, can be reduced to the following: a community should be pedestrian-friendly, be inclusive of various income levels, encourage resident interaction, and contain a mixture of uses.

Aqua meets the New Urbanism requirement of pedestrian-friendliness. It “hides the car” by providing alleys to garages so that the street front won’t be littered with parked cars and garage doors. Unlike many island developments, Aqua doesn’t have loop roads which would make for “wet lots” that have homes fronting the water and “dry lots” without views. Instead, the roads and pedestrian path stick to the shoreline, giving each resident access to 2000 linear feet of waterfront.

The pedestrians at Aqua can easily connect to their neighborhood, but may feel disconnected from the real world. New Urbanists advocate that every neighborhood have residents from different income levels. As Duany once told American Enterprise: “Society doesn’t work unless there are all kinds of people around, in relatively close proximity. Any society that has only one income level is dysfunctional.” But given the demand for waterfront property on Miami Beach, units in Aqua start at $500,000 and reach $7 million. No provisions have been made for affordable housing; Robins did not entertain this New Urbanist tenet.

Can an 8.5-acre community surrounded on three sides by water and a gate on its fourth side be considered urban? Architect Zaha Hadid, in a recent visit to Miami, offered one caveat to her positive comments about New Urbanism in the Miami New Times: “the problem is when this program is realized as a gated community.” The gate, along with zoning restrictions, eliminates the possibility of a mixed-use environment. When Alexander Gorlin contrasts Aqua’s design with typical Miami Beach development, he says: “Most of the newer [buildings] on Miami Beach … are great examples of Corbusier’s tower-in-the-park, but they turn their back on urbanism.”

Andrew Georgiadis, a planner with Miami-based firm Dover Kohl and Associates, studied with Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk while getting a Masters in Suburb and Town Design from the University of Miami. He can see Aqua from his North Beach home and echoes Hadid’s criticism of the gated entrance. But he also offers words of support. Georgiadis points out that in South Florida, getting consumers “to buy a lot with a narrow street view instead of a high-rise condo definitely says something about the value of a special design.” He says that DPZ “made a big concession in closing the street grid, but held to their guns” in other aspects of the design.

Taking a Risk in an Unusual Market

In light of the compromises made on this site, one wonders if Craig Robins is really catering to buyers looking for a “real neighborhood.” A significant percentage of high-end Miami developments are built for out-of-towners—a winter retreat for New Yorkers, a safe place to stash Latin American fortunes, or a tax haven (and a bargain given a weak dollar) for some Europeans. If Aqua attracts the same clientele, it may end up feeling like a ghost town during the hot months of summer.

Conversely, Florida’s demographics may explain why sales have been relatively slow at Aqua. Out-of-town buyers may want the anonymity, perceived security, and “known-quantity” investment value of a condominium. In a market where high-rises have sold out in a matter of days, Aqua has been slowly selling its units over the past two years; according to Robins, three-quarters of the development’s units have been sold as of this writing.

It may be that consumers don’t understand or care about New Urbanism—Miami is very focused on the automobile. Other people just don’t like the modernist “vernacular.” Morris Schmitt, an older resident of a high-rise to the west of Aqua, was out walking his small dog over the bridge next to the site on 63rd Street during one of my visits. I asked him if he had seen the plans for the development, which elicited a barrage: “What a mess. Ten architects, it hurts just thinking about it. What, is he is building some kind of museum? This is like a kid playing with Lego blocks. It doesn’t work. Still, you got to hand it to the guy who took a risk and did something different.”

When construction wraps up on Aqua later this year, Morris and his dog won’t be moving in. Those who do will find neither perfectly envisioned New Urbanism nor perfectly executed Modernism. What they will find are results of an audacious experiment in planning and design—and they just may appreciate the guy who took a risk and did something different.

REFERENCES

Duany, Andres, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Jeff. Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press, 2000.

The American Enterprise interview with Andres Duany can be found at: www.taemag.com

The Miami New Times interview with Zaha Hadid can be found at: www.miaminewtimes.com

Michael Cannon’s presentation to the South Florida Urban Land Institute can be found in PDF format at: seflorida.uli.org