Dezeen and MINI World Tour: architect Terence Riley takes us on a tour of downtown Miami and says that redevelopment of the historic area has coincided with a new emphasis on outdoor living in the city.
Downtown is a small nineteenth-century area of Miami located to the north of Miami River and the west of Biscayne Bay. Formerly the economic hub of the city, the neighbourhood was largely abandoned in the nineteen-seventies.
"The developers, their clients and the tenants needed bigger spaces," explains Riley, a partner at Keenen Riley Architects and former director of Miami Art Museum and curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art. "Eventually you saw empty stores, empty office buildings and it was really across the river, in the south, where all the development began."
Miami Art Museum, which moved to a new building designed by Herzog & de Meuron in December, was originally based in the historic downtown district as part of a cultural complex designed by American architect Philip Johnson.
"This is a very familiar tactic," Riley says. "Take a really lousy neighbourhood and what do you do? You put the cultural facilities there, because they'll go anywhere those people."
"Miami Art Museum, from its earliest days, was put into this situation of trying to be a catalyst for spurring development downtown."
Riley claims that downtown Miami is now a very different place compared to when the museum first opened in the nineteen-eighties.
"What were empty lots are being redeveloped," he says, pointing out the old post office, which has now been taken over by the American Institute of Architects.
The redevelopment and repopulation of downtown Miami has coincided with the emergence of a renewed interest in outdoor living in the city, Riley says.
"A lot of people in Miami lived this air-conditioned life 12 months a year," he explains. "Now I think the attitude is changing. You see that reflected in all the outdoor cafes and things like bike riding."
"The whole idea that you can live downtown now, shop downtown and have restaurants downtown is something completely new."
Many of the buildings in downtown Miami feature long arcades to shelter people on the streets from the elements.
"Miami was [originally] laid out as a pedestrian city," Riley explains. "Miami lost a lot of that common-sense architecture with air conditioning and underground garages where you go directly from your car into the building."
However, he believes that architects are now using similar principles in the design of new buildings.
"You'll notice on the Herzog & de Meuron museum these long, broad, overhanging eaves that provide protection all the way around the museum," he says. "These recall some of the more thoughtful, intelligent things that they used to do in the traditional city."
We drove around downtown Miami in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Jewels by Zequals. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project.
