Miami is the most misread city in the United States. The version that most people know — the beaches, the nightclubs, the glass towers of Brickell — is a surface. Underneath it is a city with a complicated history, a genuinely distinctive architectural tradition, and a set of urban problems that are more severe than almost anywhere else in the country.
The Art Deco district of South Beach is the most obvious architectural achievement. The buildings along Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue, designed in the 1930s and 1940s by architects including Henry Hohauser, L. Murray Dixon, and Albert Anis, are a coherent streetscape of pastel-colored, streamlined buildings that have no real equivalent anywhere else in the country. They were saved from demolition in the 1970s and 1980s by a preservation campaign led by Barbara Baer Capitman, who founded the Miami Design Preservation League in 1976.
The Sarasota Connection
Miami's relationship to Florida's broader architectural history is complicated. The Sarasota School of Architecture, which produced the most serious body of modernist work in the state, developed largely in opposition to the resort architecture of Miami Beach. Paul Rudolph, Ralph Twitchell, and Victor Lundy were building for the climate — for cross-ventilation, for shade, for the particular quality of Gulf Coast light — while Miami was building for the image of tropical luxury.
Miami builds for the photograph. The Sarasota School built for the afternoon.
The distinction matters because it produced two different ideas of what Florida architecture could be. Miami's version won commercially. Sarasota's version was more interesting architecturally. The tension between them is still visible in the state's built environment.
Sea Level
Miami is the American city most immediately threatened by sea level rise. The city is built on porous limestone, which means that seawalls are ineffective — water comes up through the ground as well as over the top. King tide flooding is already a regular occurrence in low-lying neighborhoods. The city has begun raising roads and installing pumps, but the scale of the problem exceeds the scale of the response.
The architectural implications are significant. Buildings designed for a fifty-year lifespan are being built in neighborhoods that may be uninhabitable in thirty years. The question of what to build, where to build it, and how long it needs to last is not abstract in Miami. It is the central question of the city's future.