Swire goes beyond the normal contours for design success
HK developer moves away from inward-looking indoor spaces to create something unique in Miami
Does size really matter when it comes to city centre planning today?
In the case of Miami, Florida, it would appear that it does, where an ambitious 5.4 million square feet mixed-use city-within-a-city redevelopment project is so large that its developer, the US subsidiary of Hong Kong’s Swire Properties, was able to propose a unique zoning plan.
“The scale of the project has been key to its success,” says the project’s Miami-based architect, Arquitectonica founder Bernardo Fort-Brescia.
“In Miami, if a land parcel is more than nine acres you can create your own zoning. So, with 9.1 acres we were able to propose our own setbacks; how we would deal with traffic; heights, everything…”
The designer, whose portfolio of international work includes Microsoft’s European headquarters in Paris and Hong Kong’s Festival Walk, believes the project’s unusual design that links a 352-room hotel, luxury retail centre, two upscale residential towers, and two Grade A office buildings by means of a raised open-air pedestrian ‘promenade’ would have been impossible to achieve had the project been developed in a piecemeal fashion following standard development controls.