Arquitectonica


airtommy

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In Amen... Send Money Reverend Bill Bob Proverb says, "And now, people, since I gotta go home and take care of my sweet Leona in our $1.75 million Arquitectonica house, I wanna play one of her tapes".  What is Arquitectonica?  It is an architecture firm based in Miami but with offices around the world.  You can read about the firm in detail and view their projects here:  https://arquitectonica.com/architecture/

I don't know if Miami Vice single-handedly made this firm famous, but the show certainly played a role.  Some of their projects:

Atlantis (Hit List, opening montage, Viking Bikers From Hell)

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Pink House (No Exit, Mirror Image)

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Villa Regina (French Twist)

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The Palace (French Twist)

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Villa Regina & The Palace in Viking Bikers From Hell

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North Dade Justice Center (Line of Fire)

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Edited by airtommy
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interesting post. the pink house is one of the most iconic houses in the show for me. not talking of the Atlantis, Miami wouldn't be the same without it

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Personally, I like some of their architecture and dislike some of it.  I dislike much of the newer stuff.  Miami is plagued by excessively tall steel & glass condo towers, especially in the Brickell area, and Arquitectonica has designed some of those.  To be fair, the condos built in Miami in the old days are also generic and unappealing.  The office buildings built in Brickell and Downtown in the 1970s and 1980s are my favorite Miami buildings.

@Pandina complained about an Arquitectonica tower in Milan:  http://miamiviceonline.com/index.php?/topic/8010-arquitectonica-tower-in-milan

Arquitectonica designed the condo that replaced our beloved OCB (Miami Shipyards).  The real estate developer (not Arquitectonica) promised to reconstruct the famous corner facade but they did not follow through.  It probably wasn't Arquitectonica's fault, but it's still disappointing considering that Miami Vice helped make them famous.

Also, their Paramount Bay project suffered a construction accident which destroyed the house seen in the movie "There's Something About Mary".  I believe that house had been registered as a historical site.

http://miamiheraldstore.mycapture.com/mycapture/folder.asp?event=1287882&CategoryID=58641

 

 

 

Edited by airtommy
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50 minutes ago, airtommy said:

Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of their architecture, especially the newer stuff.  Miami is plagued by excessively tall steel & glass condo towers, especially in the Brickell area, and Arquitectonica has designed some of those.  To be fair, the condos built in Miami in the old days are also generic and unappealing.  The office buildings built in Brickell and Downtown in the 1970s and 1980s are my favorite Miami buildings.

Pandina complained about an Arquitectonica tower in Milan:  http://miamiviceonline.com/index.php?/topic/8010-arquitectonica-tower-in-milan

Arquitectonica designed the condo that replaced our beloved OCB (Miami Shipyards).  The real estate developer (not Arquitectonica) promised to reconstruct the famous corner facade but they did not follow through.  It probably wasn't Arquitectonica's fault, but it's still disappointing considering that Miami Vice helped make them famous.

Also, their Paramount Bay project suffered a construction accident which destroyed the house seen in the movie "There's Something About Mary".  I believe that house had been registered as a historical site.

Thanks for the details!  That's so disappointing about the OCB building.  Skyscrapers in European city-centers are understandably controversial.

Edited by pahonu
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frankly i don't like skyscrappers. i already said it, i find them impersonal. but i think the problem is not the people who make money with them. the real problem, it's politics that aren't courageous enough to create strong, and restrictive population control laws. we live an era where there are too many humans on earth. it's sad to say it, but until these laws are created, i prefer a skyscrapper ruining Miami, than 10000m² disappearing in the Glades. Miami urban area population have doubled since the eighties. but if you look at the google timelapse over the area, you see that in term of superficy the urban area has almost not progressed at all. and even if it's sad to say it, i think it's because of the condominiums for the most. for now i don't find the number of Miami tall buildings catastrophic. it's seems politics there are careful about that. but if nothing is done, soon or later there will be a choice to be made. everglades, or Miami. personnally, i prefer they slaughter Miami than the everglades. actually if politics decided to create proper laws, that would be perfect. i didn't think i would ever say such things. but this is reality :(. Miami can always be fixed, the Everglades not. if you loose the glades, there's no way back

Edited by jpm1
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Good point about the Glades, there is nothing else like it in the world and water control is vital for S. Fla.  If we save the Glades we can keep the planet.  Not sure Miami can ever be fixed.

Edited by miamijimf
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Here is a profile of Arquitectonica written in 1981 as they were in the right in the middle of what I would call their heyday:

Quote

The Miami of the future is being built on Brickell Avenue now — but not in the way most people think.

Everybody knows that the old mansions on “Millionaire’s Row” are being supplanted by new condominiums. But not everyone knows that some of those condominiums will be more significant as architecture than their pretentious predecessors were.

The buildings by Arquitectonica — The Palace (1541 Brickell Ave.), The Babylon (SE 14th Street and S. Bayshore Dr.), The Atlantis (2025 Brickell Ave), The Imperial (1627 Brickell Ave.) and the Helmsley Centre (1200 S. Bayshore Dr.) contain more innovative new ideas for high-rise building than any group of buildings under construction anywhere in America.

read the rest here:  http://inspicio.fiu.edu/profiles/arquitectonica-then-1981/

One of those projects, the Babylon Apartments, has already been demolished:

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/brickell/article87870312.html

https://miami.curbed.com/2018/1/26/16936992/babylon-demolition-arquitectonica

https://www.thenextmiami.com/demolition-underway-arquitectonicas-babylon-apartments-brickell/

 

Edited by airtommy
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Hervin Romney, a partner in Arquitectonica, says the appointments of the new high-rise apartments have become about as luxurious as they can get. ''Once you have gone to the two-door refrigerator that can fly in space by itself and the oven that can program a shot to the moon, how much can you do?'' he asked.

He believes the architecture and the siting are the luxuries he offers. Arquitectonica has designed the Palace, the Atlantis and the Imperial, three new buildings on Brickell Avenue, the Park Avenue of Miami. The firm is also designing the nearby Helmsley Center, a mixed-use complex. Each project is oriented toward the bay view, and employs bright exterior colors and unusual design elements.

In the Atlantis, four stories in the center of the building were cut out for plants and a 12-person whirlpool. Mr. Romney calls it a skycourt. The building's rooftop cooling tower are covered by a huge red triangle. One facade is painted blue. The skycourt is yellow. The Imperial has a 10-story porte cochere, and the apartment tower for the Helmsley Center will have an 80-foot-wide, 220-foothigh arch in the building.

Sol Luger, the Montreal-based developer of the Atlantis, said there were no marble bathrooms in the buildings he had developed in Canada but that they had become necessities in the competitive Miami market.

He believes that apartment building luxury comes in three categories: the design of the building, the appointments of the units and the amenities for the whole project. The building has a 110-foot swimming pool, a tennis court and squash courts, but he feels that architecture is the best luxury of all. He thinks that having three apartments sharing two elevators is a luxury. The skycourt is expensive in several ways: It requires extra structural support, pipes and ventilating equipment have to be routed around it, and scaffolding will be required to paint it.

The Atlantis has an end apartment with a curved living area. Mr. Luger wanted to put in fireplaces. When he could not get a guarantee that the flues would work for 20 stories, he dropped the idea. The fireplace remains, with an electrical outlet.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/14/realestate/where-luxury-has-no-bounds.html

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On ‎10‎/‎21‎/‎2018 at 4:30 AM, jpm1 said:

frankly i don't like skyscrappers. i already said it, i find them impersonal. but i think the problem is not the people who make money with them. the real problem, it's politics that aren't courageous enough to create strong, and restrictive population control laws. we live an era where there are too many humans on earth. it's sad to say it, but until these laws are created, i prefer a skyscrapper ruining Miami, than 10000m² disappearing in the Glades. Miami urban area population have doubled since the eighties. but if you look at the google timelapse over the area, you see that in term of superficy the urban area has almost not progressed at all. and even if it's sad to say it, i think it's because of the condominiums for the most. for now i don't find the number of Miami tall buildings catastrophic. it's seems politics there are careful about that. but if nothing is done, soon or later there will be a choice to be made. everglades, or Miami. personnally, i prefer they slaughter Miami than the everglades. actually if politics decided to create proper laws, that would be perfect. i didn't think i would ever say such things. but this is reality :(. Miami can always be fixed, the Everglades not. if you loose the glades, there's no way back

Trying to limit population through legislation is an incredibly complex undertaking often with significant unintended consequences.  The notorious and draconian Chinese 1-child law has been eased and my be ended entirely in the near future because it has led to a significantly older population after almost 4 decades in place.  This has significant economic consequences as fewer working age people are left to support an ever larger post-retirement population.  The Chinese government is only starting to address the issue.  Other countries face the same problem but for other reasons.  Japan's birthrate is very low for various cultural and economic reasons and it's economy has been lackluster for the last two decades under the burden of its aging population.  Monetary incentives to have more children were implemented without much success.  Several European countries also face this problem though less extreme.  It may be unpopular politically, but economically speaking, the quickest and most effective solution is to increase immigration from places with higher birthrates and consequently younger populations and more working-age people.  Japan has resisted this approach and its struggles with this problem continue.  Those European countries have seen recent immigration ease the problem significantly.  It still, however, remains a pending problem in the entire developed world.  Interesting topic though:

http://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/ageing/

 

Edited by pahonu
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1 hour ago, pahonu said:

Trying to limit population through legislation is an incredibly complex undertaking often with significant unintended consequences. 

Not in America and the rest of the industrialized world.  All of our population growth is via immigration.  That''s incredibly easy to stop.  But neither the environmentalists nor big business want to stop it.  Only Japan has had the courage to think of the long term.

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@pahonu: this is an interesting point of view. but regarding immigration you can't block the access to an old man, or woman saying 'no we don't want you because you're too old'. personnally i think the world overpopulation is the big problem of human kind right now. we shouldn't think about it. because the more we think the more the problem goes worst. i don't have the solution but i think big families should be progressively and slowly 'devilished'. and social aids should decrease drastically after the second child. only 1 child per adult. i don't know what to do. but we should fix this urgently, because i firmly believe all the problems we experience right now come from that

Edited by jpm1
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2 hours ago, airtommy said:

Not in America and the rest of the industrialized world.  All of our population growth is via immigration.  That''s incredibly easy to stop.  But neither the environmentalists nor big business want to stop it.  Only Japan has had the courage to think of the long term.

airtommy,

That's precisely the point I was making.  Stopping immigration completely in the US and the rest of the industrialized world would make the economic problems of an aging population worse, not better.  The US total fertility rate is just about what demographers call the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, actually a little under.  The native born population, however as an even lower rate, leading to the native-born US population being older than the immigrant population, whose fertility rate is slightly above replacement rate.  If the immigrant population numbers aren't included, the ratio of post-retirement age people to working-age people would be even higher, leading to the economic problems that Japan is facing.  Japan's policies to encourage a higher fertility rate haven't worked very well and they're seeing incredible strain on their retirement system and the cost of healthcare for the elderly draining public coffers.  I'm not making any political statement of policy here.  I'm talking numbers and economics.  Without the immigrant population in the US, we'd have a much higher average age, and that would lead to even bigger strains on our Social Security and Medicare systems than we already have.  More older people equals more money paid out from those systems and fewer workers providing the funding for them.  Japan's strict immigration policies have made their aging problem worse.  The problem would disappear if the retirement age was increased to 72-75 years, but that seems like an even less popular solution.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2017/02/01/death-spiral-demographics-the-countries-shrinking-the-fastest/#2a9d92b1b83c

Edited by pahonu
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1 hour ago, jpm1 said:

@pahonu: this is an interesting point of view. but regarding immigration you can't block the access to an old man, or woman saying 'no we don't want you because you're too old'. personnally i think the world overpopulation is the big problem of human kind right now. we shouldn't think about it. because the more we think the more the problem goes worst. i don't have the solution but i think big families should be progressively and slowly 'devilished'. and social aids should decrease drastically after the second child. only 1 child per adult. i don't know what to do. but we should fix this urgently, because i firmly believe all the problems we experience right now come from that

jpm,

I agree that overpopulation is a significant problem.  They're are a finite amount of resources on the planet.  That is a different problem, however, than the economic problems associated with individual countries trying to limit births by various means.  The countries of the developed world generally have a fertility rate low enough to cause population decline, and some like Japan, are actually experiencing population decline currently.  In Germany a decades-long tendency to population decline has been offset only recently by waves of immigration, particularly from the Syrian refugee crisis.  The same is true of Italy.  In the countries of the developing world, conversely, the fertility rate is far higher leading to massive population growth.  This is where significant gains could be made in overall world population numbers.  Unfortunately, these are often desperately poor places where access to birth control is difficult or non-existent.  It's a complex problem indeed!

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