With the imminence of obsolescence due to sea level rise, Miami faces an inevitable destiny. Despite this, Miami views resilience planning through three temporal modalities. The first involves the present, with first-response attentiveness during major storms to ensure the safety of its citizens: food, shelter, medical assistance. The third involves the future: the relocation of millions to higher ground, the acquiescence to nature. The second is the most salient for architectural and urbanistic thinking: the interim period recognizes that the economic and social vitality of these areas is sufficient reason for continual investment, even if they are in the path of danger. If the volume of that investment comes with sobriety and restraint in certain cities, Miami has built its skyline–over one hundred new towers in the last twenty years. Scholars on different ends of the political and disciplinary spectrum have weighed in on the interim period with competing narratives, some bringing certainty to the city’s demise on an earlier timetable, others imagining more optimistic alternatives for extending resilience. We will examine the “interim urbanism” that will define Miami’s public realm before it succumbs to rising tides.

The infrastructure of Miami–including its airports, highways, and metro-rail system–was developed in the last century. All were developed with an acknowledgement of their relationship to the water: the Everglades National Park to the west, the coastline to the east, and the Miami River with its network of tributaries in between. With billions of dollars in public expenditure, none of these efforts were coordinated, nor did they tap into the possibility that transitions between varied media of transportation could become opportunities for public space. With waterfront access primarily privatized, the city’s disposition toward real estate speculation has dominated public investment.

Over time, a tropical suburbia evolved, with predictable morphologies including strips, malls, apartment tower districts, and raised highways with their offramps that guarantee a measure of alienation between adjacent neighborhoods. These areas have been motored by vehicular access through the 20th century, but with the densification of the suburban environment, there has emerged the capacity to define pedestrian zones. This studio will examine the latent public potential of infrastructure to foster civic spaces–above, below, and between major pieces of engineering.

Our chosen site brackets a theatrical combination of the Miami River twisting inland on the north, a monumental Miami Avenue Drawbridge twenty feet over the river on the west, the Metro-mover 5th Street Station elevated sixty feet in the air to the east, and the recently completed Brickell City Center, an open-air mall whose elevated promenades overlook our site, to the south. The studio challenge is to develop a raised ground that mediates between the four elevations of the site, but also a ground that is public, potentially civic, a constructed platform that gives public access to the river as much as to the city’s transportation networks and pedestrian zones of the downtown area.

The program of the studio includes a School of Art and Architecture for Miami Dade College, including student, faculty, and affordable housing. Students are encouraged to work in groups of two, developing joint site strategies while retaining the freedom to develop certain buildings independently.