The rebirth of Miami’s waterfront began with a sheet of paper and a lead pencil.
Last fall, third-year architecture student Mariela Davalos sat huddled over a drafting table in a second-floor design studio at the University of Miami and with a quick swipe of her pencil marked a big “X” over a massive parking garage on an aerial map of the city.
Just days earlier she and about 12 classmates stood in the September heat of that same Brickell area parking lot, jotting notes and making rough sketches as they tried to figure out how to make the space, and much of the area that surrounds it, more appealing.
When they returned to the studio, they were ready to commit their ideas to paper. On drafting sheets that covered the walls of their tiny classroom, they began to transform a segment of Miami’s public waterfront, breathing life into little-used streets and dead space with sidewalk cafés, water taxi stations, retail shops, and town houses.
Hundreds of other UM architecture students from 33 design studios performed similar magic simultaneously, adding parks, marketplaces, even an educational center with a library to a public waterfront that has never evolved the way its original planners intended. Call it a theoretical neighborhood spruce-up.
Dubbed the Miami Waterfront Project, this is the University’s biggest design initiative since a major post-Hurricane Andrew rebuilding project 15 years ago. Teams divided Miami’s waterfront into sections and went about presenting a new vision for it. Their goal? Create a boardwalk or promenade of accessible amenities that would lure people to the water.
The semester-long, school-wide initiative focused on reinvigorating the seven-mile stretch from Alice Wainwright Park, which is north of Vizcaya, to Magnolia Park at NW 39th Street, a bustling part of the metropolis where new condominiums are rising to graze the sky at a breakneck pace.
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, dean of the School of Architecture, thinks the Miami Waterfront Project could help reverse the effects of a building trend that all but eclipsed one of the city’s most valuable assets. “We’ve come to a point where, as the city builds out, it’s evident that its greatest public space is Biscayne Bay and that using a public promenade along the bay is an important thing to promote,” she says. “Our hope is to show our students the many ways the natural and built elements of a waterfront can improve the livability and beauty of a city.”
Much of the city’s shoreline is accessible only to private property owners, despite a city ordinance passed several years ago requiring all new waterfront property to have at least 50 feet of public easement for a walkway. The School of Architecture project encouraged participants to introduce new design elements geared toward complementing the area’s towering development and returning one of the city’s main attractions—its water—to the forefront.
The initial phase last fall had more than 30 faculty members and 300 students taking both walking and boat tours to assess the waterfront’s accessibility and initiate plans for its potential improvement and reinvention.
The tours enabled the teams “to experience the site and learn things you cannot by driving or from a drawing,” says Maricarmen Martinez, a School of Architecture instructor whose design studio, taught with faculty member Max Strang, had students focus on Brickell Avenue’s residential stretch.
Davalos, who grew up in Miami, worked in professor Jose Gelabert-Navia’s studio, redesigning a waterfront section near the Four Seasons Hotel Miami on Brickell Avenue with cafés and shops. Davalos’s classmate Katherine Bauder, B.Arch. ’08, working on an adjacent section, solved her quandary of how to reinvigorate a rarely used street near the upscale hotel by turning it into a promenade with park benches and gazebos. Professor Jan Hochstim’s students redesigned bayfront streets, sidewalks, and parks.
But before putting their ideas on paper, the classes studied places like Chicago, Havana, London, and Tokyo to learn how great cities have effectively used waterfronts as public attractions.
“If you think of Chicago, it’s very easy to appreciate the waterfront because it’s accessible,” says Gelabert-Navia. “Even in some Florida cities, like St. Petersburg, the waterfront is accessible. But in Miami and most other cities in the state, there’s a huge barrier, a wall, and you wouldn’t know there’s water behind it.”
Each summer for more than a decade, WaterFire has lit up the rivers in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, with 100 bonfires built on braziers. It attracts thousands of residents and visitors, who can stroll while listening to classical and world music.
“The idea is to insert activities along the water to animate the waterfront,” says Thomas Spain, a School of Architecture professor whose students revised a sector near the First Presbyterian Church on Brickell Avenue. “Water can be a social amenity, but the majority of Miami’s waterfront is not in such condition.”
In 1992 UM architecture students set out to reinvent a major portion of Miami after Hurricane Andrew destroyed hundreds of homes, businesses, and buildings in South Miami-Dade County. They provided local planning officials with a blueprint for the region’s recovery. Some of their ideas ultimately were used to rebuild the region.
Although these new plans for waterfront revitalization exist only on paper, Gelabert-Navia says the hope is for city planning officials to consider the students’ designs if any real waterfront rebuilding efforts begin.
The city’s $3 billion megaplan to revive its downtown, unveiled late last year, calls for a new baseball stadium for the Florida Marlins in Little Havana, new museums in Bicentennial Park, a streetcar line, and a port tunnel but includes nothing about resuscitating Miami’s choked-off waterfront.
Waterfront enhancement will only improve the city, says Plater-Zyberk, whose architecture firm, Duany Plater-Zyberk, has been helping Miami develop its master plan, called Miami 21.
“It would add not just to the activities downtown but the quality of life there in such a way that it would be more appealing to live and work in the area and use the facilities we’re about to spend a lot of money on,” she says.
That the city might eventually use some of the School of Architecture’s ideas for a public promenade is not as unlikely as some may think. Local government and community agencies, such as the City of Miami’s planning and parks departments, the Urban Environment League, and the Miami River Commission, lent their expertise to the Miami Waterfront Project, providing maps, charts, and other useful documents. Miami Mayor Manny Diaz attended a public launch of the initiative to throw support behind it. Speaking at the event, he acknowledged it is “important that we begin to create the kind of waterfront public space that we should have had some time ago.”
Still, urban planning and design don’t take place in a vacuum. Designs crafted on paper, once realized, can change lives, so considerations must be made for the people—rich and poor—who live and work in the region. To that end, the School of Architecture asked one of the University’s planning experts for input.
Jan Nijman, a professor of geography and regional studies who has examined urban centers from Beijing to Brussels, has seen how urban renewal projects, even those designed with the best intentions, can ignore certain groups. A new Miami waterfront, he advised students, can’t disregard local history.
“I tend to think more about people than buildings,” Nijman explains. “Any design of the waterfront should incorporate and acknowledge history because so much of Miami’s history plays out in that area.”
Since the initial phase of the Miami Waterfront Project wrapped last fall, there have been ripple effects. A summer design studio worked on additional waterfront territory, and Plater-Zyberk says a symposium to “talk about what the next steps for reality might be for the waterfront” is set for October 6 at 5 p.m. at Miami’s Freedom Tower. There, a curated exhibition of around 200 of the images from the initiative is on view from September 24 to November 7.
Whatever becomes of these designs afterward, one thing is certain, says Plater-Zyberk: It taught the students they’re part of a generation of architects “who will probably spend more time remaking places than making new places.”
Testing the Waters
 Rachel Swartz, B.Arch. ’08, stood before the room of architects and city planners, speaking strongly and clearly about revitalizing a section of the waterfront near the mouth of the Miami River.
She explained how an open-air marketplace enhanced by a pedestrian street, boardwalk, observation tower, and café would help “reinvent the city’s relationship to the Miami River by supporting the trading history that belongs to the area,” noting that William and Mary Brickell opened a trading post along the river in 1871.
Swartz was one of several students from the Waterfront Project to present final renewal plans to practicing professionals during a two-day jury late last year.
“My professors strongly encouraged our designs to be sustainable, to improve the environment,” says Swartz, whose modern-day trading post concept incorporated a “green” roof to help cool the building more efficiently and abate and recycle storm-water runoff.
Christopher Zardoya, B.Arch. ’08, proposed a broad-shaded boardwalk for his area near the Rickenbacker Causeway to reintroduce some of the region’s natural landscape. Sofia Konstantinidis, B.Arch. ’08, displayed her idea for an environmental education center, complete with classrooms, exhibition space, and a library near the mouth of the Miami River.
“There is so much thought that must go into designing a revitalized waterfront,” Swartz admits. “The relationships between the boardwalk and the surrounding environment are crucial. It is not only what is aesthetically appealing but also what is environmentally friendly—and that the design is functional.”
Design studio instructor Maricarmen Martinez is happy with the diversity of thought the challenge inspired. “Some students created a waterfront park,” she says, “while others chose to create stronger connections to the neighborhood.”
Whether their ideas come to life in the end or not, Jose Gelabert-Navia, their design studio professor, considers the jury period the most significant lesson.
“The best part of the exercise,” he explains, “is that they had to present their work and defend it. That’s the way it’ll be once they become professionals.”
ROBERT C. JONES JR. is an editor at the University of Miami. |
