PLUSURBIA DESIGN'S JUAN MULLERAT QUOTED ON HERITAGE TRAIL:

ONE OF THE REASONS THE ARCHER WESTERN-THE DEMOYA GROUP
SIGNATURE BRIDGE AND OVERTOWN-UNIFYING URBAN DESIGN 
IS THE CLEAR WINNING CHOICE FOR 395

From the Miami Herald, by Andres Viglucci:

After a decade of planning and debate, the competition to build a bridge that would define downtown Miami came down to two starkly different designs: One, declared the winner by a mere half point, is a six-arched suspension structure meant to recall a spouting fountain over Biscayne Boulevard.

The other, the clear favorite of a committee of four community representatives charged with scoring plans on aesthetic grounds, is a pair of support pylons resembling dancers in a pas de deux at the door to the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

But the so-called signature bridge — the focus of a still-roiling dispute over state transportation officials’ handling of the selection of a contractor to rebuild Interstate 395 — is only the most salient element in an unusually ambitious $800 million expressway project that aims no less than to radically remake a critical stretch of downtown Miami.

As it takes down and replaces the obsolescent, mile-and-a-half-long I-395, the Florida Department of Transportation, responding to years of pushing and litigation by local residents and elected officials, will also attempt to remedy the damage done to the historic black community of Overtown and Miami’s urban fabric when the expressway cut its destructive path through the area in the 1960s.

A key piece of the project — extensive improvements at ground level — would transform what’s now a blighted, disconnected no-man’s land of oppressively low overpasses and closely spaced columns beneath I-395 into a series of sunsplashed parks, gardens and public spaces linked by a mile-long pathway between Overtown and Biscayne Bay. All of that would be made possible by raising the new expressway farther off the ground and drastically reducing the number of support piers, allowing sunlight to shine through for the first time in 50 years.

At about 55 acres, the stretch of land under and around the new I-395 would be the largest urban park in the city of Miami, notes Juan Mullerat, a Miami planner and architect on the team selected by FDOT for the expressway project, a joint venture led by contractors Archer Western of Chicago and Miami’s The de Moya Group.

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