MIAMI | Development Thread

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by QuantumX

Now here , I don't disagree with you, it's just that you originally said lack of a corporate presence was the reason for Miami's lack of height, not lack of tall office towers and I disagree with you here because taller buildings had been planned that were not office towers.

I'm not following you, but no matter, we don't need to get back into that stuff.

And again, I do love Miami's skyline. I realize that it's a tropical city and the design and function of the buildings will reflect that.


In other news:

Miami planning board speeds along massive Brickell redevelopment proposal

An ambitious mixed-use plan off Brickell Avenue sailed through Miami’s planning and zoning board.

BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI

After sailing through its first public hearing with no opposition, the most ballyhooed local redevelopment plan since Midtown Miami appears headed for speedy city approval, promising to transform a long-dead zone off Brickell Avenue into a new urban district characterized by cutting-edge design, pedestrian-friendly streets and novel environmental features.

After heaping praise on the mammoth Brickell CitiCentre proposal, the city’s planning and zoning board voted 7-0 Tuesday night to recommend approval to the city commission, which will take up the project next week in the first of two hearings. No one spoke in opposition, although two speakers raised relatively minor issues.

City officials, who are co-applicants along with the developer, Swire Properties, told board members the $700 million, mixed-use project will plug a gaping void in the city’s urban core. They said it would inject new life, jobs and commerce into the area, fill city coffers to the tune of $5 million annually in property taxes, and knit together the successful Mary Brickell Village redevelopment to its south with the Miami River and downtown Miami to the north.

Swire, which developed nearby Brickell Key, proposes to erect a residential tower, hotel, two mid-rise office buildings and extensive, street-fronting retail and restaurant space on three-and-a-half mostly vacant blocks straddling South Miami Avenue. Swire said construction could begin as soon as early 2012, would proceed in phases and be completed within four years of its start.

“It will have an immediate effect on our economy,’’ Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado said.

The project, designed in its entirely by Miami-based Arquitectonica, boasts a degree of pedestrian and transit friendliness new to Miami. It’s the first of its scale planned under the city’s new Miami 21 zoning code, designed to create denser and livelier urban streets.

It’s also among the first in the nation to conform to new “green’’ Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, standards that promote creation of sustainable neighborhoods -- dense districts easily navigated on foot, by public transit or by bike.

Swire promises wider sidewalks, hundreds of trees, storefronts open to the street, and a new traffic-calming circulation pattern on the existing streets, now hard to cross because of speeding cars and trucks. The project would also incorporate an existing People Mover station, which would be rebuilt to allow passengers to disembark directly into the development as well as the street below.

A new greenway under the mover guideway would connect to the Miami River. There would be hundreds of bike rack spaces, too.
The project also includes two large pedestrian bridges spanning South Miami Avenue and Southeast Seventh Street. Swire says they will be different from the stark pedestrian bridges erected in the ‘70s, which fell into disfavor because they sapped street life by keeping people inside self-enclosed projects.

CitiCentre’s bridges, Swire says, will have shops and restaurants and are part of a complex circulation plan meant to get people on foot from the People Mover station through the complex and down to ground level, where shops will open directly onto the sidewalks.

“They’re not void spaces,’’ said Arquitectonica principal Bernardo Fort-Brescia. “They will have life and activity.’’

Pedestrians would be shielded from the harsh Miami weather by a “climate ribbon’’ -- a translucent canopy that will snake through the entire project, filtering natural light down to the pedestrian bridges and the open-air shopping areas and gardens at ground level. The canopy, which also have solar panels to feed energy to the complex, would create a cooling “micro-climate’’ beneath it without the use of air conditioning, Fort-Brescia said.

The project hardly stints motorists, however: It would boast two levels of underground parking throughout.


Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/06/1...#ixzz1PVH787J2


Comments on the article are interesting... they all seem to wish the land was being used as a park... like I've been griping about on here.