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Miami Civic Center Contest

Architecture Competition in Florida Winning Design by Amit C. Price Patel, Ian Dunn & Amanda Loper, USA

Jun 17, 2010

Miami Civic Center

Location: Miami, Florida, United States of America

“MIAMI S_PARK” WINS FIRST PLACE IN MIAMI CIVIC CENTER COMPETITION

San Francisco, June 15, 2010—MIAMI S_PARK, a proposal for a new mixed-use park and civic center, earned first-place prize in the juried international Miami Civic Center competition, sponsored by the AIA Miami and organized by Arquitectum.

The winners were announced May 14, 2010. The project is located in downtown Miami and includes a new city hall, architecture museum, cathedral, and luxury and affordable housing. The winning design is by San Francisco-based architects and designers Amit C. Price Patel, Ian Dunn, and Amanda Loper.

images from Amit C. Price Patel

Project Summary

The project is composed of three parts: Superpark, Axis and Active Edge. The Superpark is a continuous green carpet of gardens, urban agriculture, wetlands, and play fields with a collection of park pavilions. The Axis, the main civic space for Miami, begins in downtown and gently slopes into Biscayne Bay.

A ribbon of public buildings including an architecture museum, the City Hall, and the Water Cathedral represent cultural, political, and religious faces of the city. The Active Edge adds density and a mix of uses along the promenade to create a working waterfront neighborhood.

Project Description

Waterfront parks, currently disconnected, are aggregated and linked together to make a Superpark. The Superpark is a continuous green carpet of gardens, urban agriculture, wetlands, and play fields with a collection of pavilions for shops, education, and food. New greenways extend south to Brickell, north to the Performing Arts District, west into downtown and east to the Port of Miami via a new pedestrian bridge. The connection between the urban and natural is represented with the native Florida karst topography pattern that forms building surfaces, paving, planters, shade structures, benches, and lighting.

The public heart of MIAMI S_PARK is a new civic Axis that connects the cultural, political and religious faces of Miami. The Axis begins in downtown across from Freedom Tower, crosses Biscayne Boulevard over a raised crosswalk and gently slopes into the Bay.

The Axis is edged by a ribbon of buildings including the architecture museum, City Hall, a series of common rooms available for public events, and a food and music hall. City Hall is punctuated with a tower to form a gateway on the boulevard. The terminus of the axis is the Water Cathedral with views to the open ocean beyond.

The Miami 21 Plan calls for adding density and mixed uses downtown. One way to achieve this goal is to utilize the waterfront to make an Active Edge. Just as New York’s Central Park is surrounded on all sides by the city, the MIAMI S_PARK project creates a park surrounded by a working waterfront neighborhood with a variety of housing types, open spaces, retail, office, and marina uses. Building heights and intensity of uses increase along the waterfront where important downtown paths like Flagler Street intersect with the Promenade.

Downtown Miami needs a spark, an infusion of urban energy, a place where Miamians can gather, use and love their city. S_PARK thinks big and extends beyond the original competition boundaries physically and programmatically not just to propose a static design, but to propose a way of reimagining the city as both a mosaic of public uses and as a space for sustainable experimentation. S_PARK is not a just a park, it’s an urban strategy.

Miami Civic Center Competition – Further Information

– First prize includes $3000 and a paid trip to the AIA Miami Convention. Details on the winning proposals may be found at: http://www.arquitectum.com/index.php
– The competition was sponsored by the AIA Miami in conjunction with the 2010 AIA convention. The competition was organized and administered by Arquitectum (contact:
Lorena Ugarte, lugarte(at)arquitectum.com)
– Competition jurors were Jean Françoise Lejeune, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Laurinda Hope Spear, Adam Drisin

Miami Civic Center competition winners team – Personal Resumes

Amit C. Price Patel, AIA, LEED AP, an architect and urban designer in San Francisco, has won several international design competitions, individually and collaboratively, including the Urban Re:Vision Dallas competition, the SF Prize housing competition, and the USGBC Portland TOD competition. Amit was a 2002 recipient of the Branner Traveling Fellowship, which allowed him to study the regeneration of high-rise social housing in Brazil, Europe, and Asia. His professional work is primarily focused on highdensity sustainable, affordable housing projects in urban contexts.

Ian Dunn, AIA, LEED AP, an architect in San Francisco, was a contributor to last year’s successful Urban Re:Vision Dallas entry. In 2003 Columbia University awarded Ian the American Institute of Architects’ Medal, and a William Kinne Traveling Fellowship – allowing him to conduct a survey of protest spaces in cities across Europe. Ian has been a licensed architect for 13 years, and has experience in many facets of the profession, including multi-family & senior housing, educational facilities & civic master planning.

Amanda Loper, LEED AP, a designer in San Francisco, was on the winning team of Urban Re:Vision’s Dallas Competition in 2009. In 2005, she earned a dual Bachelor degree in architecture and interior architecture from Auburn University. While there, she worked at the Rural Studio and won the school’s thesis prize for her project “This is What Eye See”. With personal and professional interests in graphic design, architecture and the urban environment, her current work includes furniture making, designing transit oriented multifamily housing and investigating issues of density within the urban context.

Miami Civic Center competition images / information received 160610

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