A once ambitious plan to renovate and expand the Miami Beach Convention Center has recently fallen victim to regime change and a new, less extensive rebuilding plan. The original plan, which resulted in a price tag escalating to $1.1 billion, was discarded after the election of the new mayor, Philip Levine, who, since taking office this year, has asked for a new start to the project and issued an RfQ in that regard. As a result of this change in the City’s strategy, the winner of the original competition, led by South Beach ACE with Rem Koolhaas and OMA has threatened legal action against the City of Miami Beach for breach of contract.
Coming to a decision on the original competition, won by OMA early last summer over the Danish firm BIG, led by Bjarke Ingels, was hardly a clear-cut matter. Initially, the Miami Herald reported the Portman Team with BIG as the winner. Just a few days later, OMA was announced as the winner. Was this sort of confusion a portent of bad tidings for the future for this project? After the selection of OMA—and this was before the election of the new mayor—sticker shock apparently set in, and downsizing was now on the table. When the new mayor took over, the competition results were scuttled, which has led to the present situation: a new start for a much less ambitious project was announced with a new RfQ. The result: there is a looming court case between ACE/OMA and the City.
The Project
Developing the site of the present Miami Beach Convention Center into something it is not is a difficult challenge. This is mainly because it is three blocks from the beach. Lincoln Road, for example, derives its popularity as a shopping and restaurant destination, not only because it is a block from the beach, but is easily accessible from major hotels off Collins Avenue. This set of circumstances is what designers from OMA and BIG were faced with in their redo of the present Convention Center and its environs.
When BIG suggested the demolition of the Gleason Theater to make room for a hotel, this elicited a public outcry. To retain the Gleason, BIG’s solution was to relocate the hotel on top of the Convention Center, an idea already in the ACE/OMA proposal. BIG also proposed locating the large ballroom as a separate structure across a planned plaza from the main convention building. This led some in Miami to wonder if a plaza would work in the Miami Beach environment when conventions were not in session, some pointing out that plazas traditionally have never worked as pedestrian attractions in Miami Beach.
By locating the ballroom in the main convention center structure, OMA did manage to generate more park space. But here, some critics maintained that their scheme lacked the high-density character demanded by such an urban site. In essence, both proposals endeavored to provide the project with an ensemble, which, aside from convention center business, would act as an urban generator for activity. Given the location and peculiar set of circumstances, this would have seemed to be an almost insurmountable task, even at $1.1 billion. A giant farmer’s market might have been what the site needs.
Detroit’s Dia Plaza competition is hardly unique in initiating a search for urbanistic solutions to a cultural cluster. Vienna, Berlin, Mesa, Fort Worth, Chicago’s Millennium Park and Paris’ Parc de la Villette are just a few examples of projects where the focus on spaces between buildings, and arriving at a connective plan to infuse new energy into the site, has been the primary goal of other projects. All of these have been faced with their own challenges: solutions for some have been relatively simple—Vienna’s Museum Quarter and Berlin’s Forum—while others such as Paris’ La Villette and Mesa’s Downtown Plaza represent a more challenging subject spatially. In the case of Detroit, the aim of the competition was clear: “The design competition centers around enhancing and enlivening the DIA’s exterior campus and aims to connect all the institutions with a beautiful series of settings that support all types of programming and public art.”
Form and Dichroic Light Scott Hall at Carnegie Mellon University Michelle LaFoe and Isaac Campbell OFFICE 52 Architecture Forward by Cesar Pelli, FAIA Introduction by Michael J. Crosbie, FAIA Leete”s Island Books, Maine USA Hard cover; 96 pages in color ISBN 9780918172709
In his introduction to Form and Dichroic LIght, Michael Crosbie never mentions the term, “wild card,” to describe Office 52’s participation in the invited competition for the Carnegie Mellon Engineering Building. The four finalists, picked from a list of 17 firms, also included three household names: ZGF, Wilson, and BCJ (Bohlin Cywinski, Jackson). So what possible chance could a firm, which had just recently opened a small office in Portland, Oregon, have against a competition lineup of this magnitude? But as OFFICE 52 Principal, Isaac Campbell explained, as a small firm, “we were quite nimble,” and the $50,000 stipend the firms all received to produce a design could allow OFFICE 52 more time to undertake the research involved than might be the case with a larger office, where a cost controller is constantly focusing on the operation.
Milton Keynes, known simply as MK, represented one of the more significant results of the UK’s “new town” programs from the 1950s and 60s. Situated almost equidistant between Oxford and Cambridge, and within easy access from London, the city had everything one might expect from a modern community—except a university. For a city having a population exceeding 250,000, and projected to have 500,000 inhabitants by 2050, that will all change, as a competition supported by the MK Council (MKC) and Cranfield University has resulted in five firms competing for the opportunity to design a higher educational institution to eventually accommodate 15,000 students.
If cities in the U.S. are anticipating funding from government entities to solve a dire need for affordable housing, they should be prepared for a long wait. The national government, a traditional source of funds for such projects, has shown little if no interest in the issue, and state and local sources are at a minimum. To exacerbate the problem, the construction cost of affordable housing has risen exponentially the the past few decades. Gone are those days when architects such as Oakland-based Michael Pyatok could build affordable housing for $100 a square foot.
The Rails to Trails program, which gained momentum after the1984 Federal Land Banking Law—supported by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy—has seen over 24,000 miles of trails established where rail lines once existed. Some sites were strictly urban, while others, sometimes over 100 miles in length, were primarily rural, while others combined some of both.
The reunification of Germany in 1989 not only had a great impact on the lives of many Germans, especially those living in the former DDR,but together with the decision to move the nation’s capital from Bonn to Berlin resulted in two major international design competitions in 1992: the first was to convert the existing Reichstag building into a home for the German parliament, the second being the Spreebogen planning competition, which included a chancellery for the head of state as well as needed buildings nearby for the Federal government.
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