Arquitectonica

The 1982 Atlantis Condominum in downtown Miami by Arquitectonica is a bold building, with unexpected shapes and colors. This work is a celebration of the frivolity of Miami as a city obsessed with image and celebrity, and with lots of money to spend. It was famously (and apropiately) featured in the Miami Vice credits along with women in bathing suits, flamingos, windsurfs and speedboats. 

The Atlantis launched the Arquitectonica firm into stardom. Their ability to capture with such clarity the identity of a city in a building was indeed a notable achievement. As Miami's population exploded during the eighties and nineties, many of its new buildings were designed by this firm. Unfortunately, their later work is not quite as fresh as the Atlantis. It consists mostly of tall buildings with capricious shapes that do not always manage to convey a sense of place (or to stand out from what other architects are doing in Miami).

During my visit to Miami one other building by Arquitectonica caught my attention: a parking lot in South Beach. This structure was built over a group of existing buildings and disguised behind heavy gardening. This is a nice gesture both because of the preservation of the older buildings (which are probably protected) and because it hides a parking lot without pretending it's not there. The building is a nice addition to Miami; like the Atlantis, it makes for an interesting sight and is somewhat irreverent.

Miami's Art Deco Architecture

Miami is known for its Art Deco architecture. There are many buildings in this "style" in the South Beach area. I recently took a walk there and was most surprised by the poor quality of the architecture. The buildings in South Beach are not spectacular--similar ones can be found in many places in the U.S. that had considerable growth (and not much money) in the twenties and thirties. The façades are flat and the massing is unremarkable. Compared to the overwhelming (in size, composition and sophistication) Deco buildings of cities such as New York, those in Miami are not impressive. None of them is valuable in itself.

This does not mean, however, that the Miami Art Deco district is uninteresting. It is fascinating that someone had the vision to restore the area's buildings and convert them into an expression of the city's identity. There are dozens of cities in the U.S. and elsewhere that have lacked this vision and destroyed what was valuable or could have been made valuable of their architecture. Miami has a nice "traditional" district where tourists flock and where commerce thrives. Miami has a neighborhood with which its population identifies, and which brings them together as an urban community. Few cities can take pride in having achieved so much with so little. 

San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena

This early work by Aldo Rossi remains unfinished, and there appear to be plans to modify it considerably. In fact, part of it has already been modified. Yet this does not seem to bother many. The woman at the entrance of the cemetery said that few people visited, and that she could hardly understand why I did. In her opinion the building was ugly and depressing. Similarly, I met some Milan architects while in Italy who could not believe I would rather visit works by Rossi than others by more fashionable architects, say Libeskind or Fuksas. They thought of the cemetery as nothing more than an extravagant curiosity.

I was bothered by the general lack of appreciation for this building, which I consider one of the most significant of the second half of the 20th century. Few have achieved to make architecture metaphysical. Entering the cemetery is like entering the world of platonic forms, where time (and thus decay) does not exist. The visitor is inevitably confronted with death, but also with the hope for eternity; the cemetery's simple shapes and spatial configuration separate visitors from their everyday lives and introduce them into something like a Cartesian plane where truths are constant and irrevocable.

Rossi's exploration of the simple shapes and architectural elements is also a statement on architecture itself. While Libeskind and Fuksas might spend days and weeks and months making sure their buildings do not look like buildings, Rossi struggled throughout his career to apprehend and communicate in his designs the essence of the basic components of the built environment--walls, columns, floor and roof slabs, and hallways, porticos, windows and doorways. Hence the cemetery's repetitive and exaggerated gestures (which many fail to see as more than caricatures). In this way, Rossi was similar to the Russian Suprematists and the Dutch Neoplasticists, who painted compositions of lines and planes in basic colors to achieve spiritual effects.

Saint John Newmann Church in Miami

This wonderful Catholic church in south Miami, designed by Bilbao architects Javier Cenicacaleya and Iñigo Saloña dates from the early nineties but, thanks to its atemporal design, the quality of the detailing and of the construction, it looks as if it had been built yesterday. 

The entrance to the building is through an elegant portico with slender red columns. Behind the columns is a small garden with a reflecting pool, enclosed by a freestanding wall. On the other is the entrance to the church. This portico is a space where the church community can dwell before and after services. On one side of the portico there are three shutters that, I was told during my visit, open up to small shops that serve coffee on Sundays.

The building's main door on the portico opens to a lobby, with a day care and Sunday school classrooms on the left and the church on the right. This space has high windows with stained glass, and passages of the scripture painted below them. The lower part of the walls is paneled with wood. On the other end of the main door there is a small chapel with a circular plan.

The church itself is has a square plan, with the altar at the end wall, and a gallery with additional seating on the three remaining sides. The floor, covered in a blue carpet, slopes down gently, and the seating is arranged radially. 

The ceiling is the most notable aspect of this space: it is a segment of a sphere that appears to be suspended. At the center of this ceiling there is a lantern that provides the church with evocative natural light. Light also enters this space through a gap between the ceiling and the church's walls.

This church is outstanding as the centerpiece of a religious and urban community. Surrounded by one-story single-family houses where most of the parishioners live, its distinctive shapes can be recognized from afar. Its layout is significant in the same way: it was conceived for people to gather and talk and relate to each other as members of a community with common beliefs and experiences. I was there on a weekday but ran into a few people who evidently identified with their church and took care of it proudly. "You should return here on Sunday," one said. "Our Sunday masses are beautiful."