Yale School of Architecture | Fall 2017
Advanced Studio | Emre Arolat + Gonca Paşolar
Critic: Kyle Dugdale
Partner: Istvan van Vianen
An Ocean-front Development to Leverage Market Greed for the City
Miami Beach is among the ultimate tourism destinations in the US. The city has been remembered and fantasized for its seashores, bars, clubs, and tropical flair. What underlies all these tokens of Miaminess is its vibrant social life. However, consumerist developments have been gnawing at social life on the beach. Profit drives developers erect privatized luxury hotels and condos, chopping the beachfront into fenced bubbles. Since contributing to the urban life goes against their privilege and profit, beachfront developments are increasingly disengaged from the city.
The most pertinent challenge in our face is not to design good architectures with high quality urban spaces, but to ensure such spaces are respected and maintained as they are intended to by the owners. In other words: can we design a game in which publicness is anchored at the core of profitability, thus invite beachfront developments to play along?
What is Miaminess?
Miaminess is in threat.
While the beach is the most striking icon of Miaminess, the current beachfront developments, mostly luxury hotels and condominiums, work against Miami Beach's public nature. They seclude the beachfront, erect walls against the city, and chew into the sand with hedges and fences. The beach has become the city's last defense of public life, side by side with the most concentrated band of consumerist privatization.
Voluntary Prisoners of Beachfront Hotels
Self righteous developments transformed the beachfront into a heterotopic landscape. While people pay for rooms to enjoy Miami Beach, they venture into the city for social life, even when the Miaminess they are after is right outside. Within the invisible walls of social isolation, they became voluntary prisoners in their paid cells.
Why look out for fun when you can party at home?
EMBRACE THE GAME
Instead of fighting Miami's beachfront development pattern, the project works with it. Five mix-use hotel blocks each is an islands of varying tastes and lifestyles, manifesting the will of individual owners, whereas the Halo bridges them to achieve a unified gesture and experience. The sixth block, a former parking lot, is transformed as a performance park joining the Halo.
Preserve
Insert
Unite
Public Flow
Ramps, stairs, escalators, and elevators lead people from the street all the way on to the podiums of hotel blocks, and further up to meet the Halo. Program attractors (retails, amenities, etc.) are spread along to keep the flow pumping.
Halo-Hotel Joints
The Halo has its stand-alone program attractors to establish its own presence, not necessarily relying on the hotels.
While the public program attractors of the hotels are profit-driven, the Halo carries three non-profit driven show spaces. They are managed by the Halo's stewarding agency and cater to non-profit driven public events, such as lectures, talks, exhibitions, etc.
HALO: NEUTRAL UNIFICATION
The Halo unifies the individually operating hotels with neutral urban leisure spaces and show spaces managed by a non profit driven third party agency. The Halo's neutrality, reinforced by the performance park offering its independent access & program attractor, facilitates a steady public flow, making sure that cooperating with the Halo scheme stay lucrative to property owners. Public life is thus anchored at the center of profitability.
GROUND FLOOR: CONSUMERIST HETEROTOPIAS
The podiums contain most of the hotels' public programs (reception, retail, amenities, etc.). These are fully managed and operated on an individual basis, and configured to aim at commercial interest. From the ground floor, the project almost fully comply to the current model of development on the beachfront: profit driven consumerist heterotopias independently run by hotel owners.
Each hotel block is designed with a cascading podium bringing pedestrian onto its top, and one or multiple guest-room towers elevated above.
The Halo is broken into several segments on different heights to fit itself onto the site, but the circulation maintains continuous.
Show The Visitors... And The City!
All the show spaces on the Halo are designed with maximum transparency. They are meant to show not only to the visitors within, but also to the city. Even though the content of the shows are not always visible to the people on the street due to distance, a vibrant backdrop with the awareness of "something is up" is enough to lure people in.
The entrance of the performance park sits on the focal point of the Halo. An outdoor theatre allows people to walk up onto the Halo as they enjoy performance events of the city,