Fifteen months ago the Miami City Commission shot down a recommendation to make the Babylon, the first multifamily building designed by renowned Miami firm Arquitectonica (and its second project ever), a historically protected building.
As a result, the 37-year-old Babylon [...] will be demolished sometime before July.
— Biscayne Times
Telling the history of the building and Miami's Brickell neighborhood, Biscayne Times senior writer Erik Bojnansky explains that "in 1978, Arquitectonica was still an up-and-coming Coral Gables firm. Babylon was its second building, the first being the 6900-square-foot single-family home known as Pink House, on the Miami Shores waterfront, created for Spear’s parents. Even before Babylon was completed in 1982, Progressive Architecture, a respected architecture and design magazine, bestowed an award on the design renderings, which alluded to the ancient Hanging Gardens of Babylon."
"those kinds of people" had arguably better aesthetic taste than whoever did the supersized junk buildings that now exist on either side of the Babylon.
For me, Arquitectonica's work became really weak after 1986 or so, making preservation of their early stuff important.
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interesting article. clearly though this isn't a matter of architectural history - it's a proxy fight against upzoning in a city famous for that (and which Arquitectonica has greatly contributed to!)
I liked this statement:
“To try and preserve a place that was built on the cheap by a guy that was high most of the time that he didn’t know what was coming or going, not to the extreme as the real Scarface in the movie, but, boy, it’s amazing to me that we’re discussing this 35 years later,” Carollo stated during the January 2018 meeting. “This is not a historic building.”
Carollo later added, “I don’t think anybody wants to glorify and make historic this kind of building that was built with these kinds of people.”
-Commissioner Joe Carollo
"those kinds of people" had arguably better aesthetic taste than whoever did the supersized junk buildings that now exist on either side of the Babylon.
For me, Arquitectonica's work became really weak after 1986 or so, making preservation of their early stuff important.
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