AQUA MIAMI BEACH

TROPICAL URBANISM: Is Miami Beach’s unique Aqua urban development New Urbanism despite its exclusivity and gated entrance?

By Steve Wright

Beyond the porches, the garages hidden in alleys, the liner buildings and walkable neighborhoods, it seems that the hallmark of New Urbanism is seeing value where others see deterioration, vacant land, abandoned sites, blight.

Take Aqua, for example. The Miami Beach development has arguably created more pre-move in buzz than any New Urbanist project in history. Today, the Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company master-planned project is on a site that is a no-brainer, a certain cash cow.

But for years, hundreds of developers, architects, designers and jet setters drove past an 8.5-acre piece of ground and only saw an ugly collection of mid-century buildings sitting vacant on what was an island hospital complex in the north reaches of Miami Beach. No one had the urban vision to turn it into one of the most sought after urban sites on the planet.

That is, no one had the vision until a man who as born in St. Francis Hospital -- the very structure that sat abandoned on the southern tip of Alison Island for so many years – transformed this spit of land into Aqua. Aqua features 151 residences with modernist design and a setting that has been called a tropical East Village, because of its narrow streets, high density, and mid- to low-rise scale on a lush and green sitting in Miami Beach.

Craig Robins, a Miami Beach boy who entered this world in the birthing center at the former St. Francis Hospital, is the developer of Aqua. From a very young age, he established an unequaled track record of investing in edgy South Florida urban areas that soon turned to gold.

The South Beach of today – with its sleek deco hotels, high-end retail and seaside cafes – has some of the most prime real estate in the nation. But not that long ago, it was a forgotten retirement ghetto so deteriorated that the treasured art deco confections were slated for demolition to make way for characterless high rises. But the 47-year-old Robins saw value there, invested, reprogrammed aging deco delights and made himself a mint.

When people gave up on the mainland, when they believed Miami was too similar to the TV show that portrayed cocaine cowboys, random violence and other urban ills, Robins bought up properties in a downtrodden area north of downtown Miami. He transformed it into the hip Design District, which now has designer showrooms, a few nightclubs and lots of creative people. It even has a rapidly developing residential element where not that long ago, people wouldn’t have lived there if you paid them to.

At Aqua, people are paying a lot of money to live there. Prices start at $700,000 for condominiums and soar to roughly $4 million for the best-located townhome. Robins himself is moving into one of the four-story townhomes at the southern tip of Aqua, which affords stunning views of tropical Indian Creek and the South Beach skyline.

“What we’re doing with Aqua is truly unique, not just to Miami Beach, but to the entire world,” said Robins, the president of Dacra development. “We’ve brought together some of the brightest and most innovative thinkers --- planners, architects, designers and artists --- and asked them to create a world class neighborhood that is of the highest quality, a neighborhood that has its own distinct characteristics yet one that is respectful of the area where it resides.”

“We’re combining New Urbanist principles with architecture inspired by mid-century Modernism in a way that is really defining 21st century living in Miami Beach. That approach has captured the attention of sophisticated buyers, along with the world’s art, design, and architecture media,” he continued.

By many standards, Aqua is New Urbanism. It is urban infill, of sorts. The old, ghastly-looking St. Francis parking garage was salvaged and converted into a screened parking structure and residences by New York architect Walter Chatham. In an area of Miami Beach not far from 42-story condo towers, Aqua’s tallest buildings are 11 stories, which blend more with the low and mid-rise neighborhoods immediately surrounding it.

But, with an almost exclusively residential area on a very compact site, Robins decided to develop Aqua as a gated community. The gates throw up red flags to several New Urbanism purists. The Pro-Urb listserv, a hotbed of commentary by notoriously obsessive NU nerds, has taken a negative approach toward otherwise well-planned projects that feature the exclusionary symbolism of gates or guardhouses.
“The gated community, it is very politically charged, but a lot of people choose to live in them,” Chatham said. “I can’t really comment on the evils of the gated community and whether they are socially negative.”

“I will say that first of all, you’re on an isolated piece of ground and it doesn’t allow commercial (other than a small neighborhood store with gourmet market, newsrack and dry clean dropoff),” he continued. “If the intention of New Urbanism is to reclaim areas and make them as urban as possible, part of that reclamation has to include security. Not everything is a downtown area. Sixty-Third Street (at the northern entrance to Aqua) is not pedestrian friendly and the site is not a contiguous downtown area.”

Chatham designed a mid-rise condominium in the International Style. It has a swimming pool surrounded by terraces.

“Mine was an existing building,” Chatham said of the old St. Francis garage and office structure. “I transformed it from the ugliest building in Miami Beach to one that at least fits in with the area. Art is super-important. A Richard Tuttle eight-story mural is going on my building where a blank wall was left over from the previous configuration.”

“The density of Aqua is very off-putting to a lot of people because people are used to seeing open spaces and a tower along the South Florida coast,” he added. “But once the landscaping is in, with a mango grove, it opens to a very nice view. The way they focused those streets at Indian Creek, the views are beautifully shocking and amazing. The whole island is so walkable.”

'Buyers are certainly connecting with Aqua’s design and urbanism. With condominiums ready for interior build out in September (projected move-in at end of the year) and with the first of the island homes ready for possession in December, 80 percent of Aqua’s residents have already sold.

“Aqua is about simplicity and good modern architecture,” said Alison Spear, a Miami architect who designed two linked residential buildings on a very tight sight only 25 feet from the old St. Francis structure that Chatham redid. “I was very keen on mine being modern, with nods to the Eden Roc and Miami Modern. Aqua is the perfect collaboration between great town planners, great architects and a great developer.”

New York architect Alexander Gorlin designed a very modern mid-rise condo with deep sunscreens to shade the structure from the subtropical sun.

“I believe New Urbanism doesn’t mean traditional architecture, I believe it can have modern buildings. The key concept of New Urbanism is density and urban spaces – the design doesn’t have to be Victorian,” said Gorlin, who is aware that some extreme traditionalists have knocked Aqua’s modernist design from the condos to the townhouses.

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk of DPZ agrees that Aqua took its tone from “Miami Beach’s great tradition of 20th century design.”

While DPZ is best known for town planning and championing the principals of New Urbanism, the firm designed two of the Island Houses at Aqua.

“We actually designed all the floor plans for the taller buildings too,’’ Plater-Zyberk said. “The site is so tight, Craig (Robins) needed to know what could be built there, so DPZ planned all the floor plans for the mid-rise buildings. The
individual architects modified those drawings.”

She said the architecture of Aqua borrows from early 20th century modernism when Art Nouveau transitioned to Art Deco. It also plays off the Miami Modern Architecture of mid-century Miami legendary architect Morris Lapidus. Beyond that, the DPZ townhouses will be just plain fun to live in, Plater-Zyberk said.

“One of the fun things is the view outside from them,” she said. ”Everywhere you look, from every level, the view changes. You see greenery on the nearby developed areas, parts of the Miami Beach skyline, the waterway, other parts of Aqua. “Instead of looking at only landscaping, it is a very urban view.”

To the gated community critics, Plater-Zyberk answers that a guardhouse at Aqua is equivalent of a doorman at a highrise. She points out that many of Aqua’s residents will not live there year round, so they require the security of a gated entry. She also said that geography – the fact that Aqua is the tip of a narrow island surrounded by water on three sides – dictates that the development will not have total connectivity with the neighborhoods around it.

“One of the keys to remember is that Aqua is a redevelopment site,” she said. “We tried to save even more of the old hospital – we cost Craig a lot of money studying the structural soundness of the old hospital buildings and what could be done with them if they were transformed into residential structures. Everything looks so new there, but people have to remember that Aqua is a dense, compact urban redevelopment site.

Robins, who paid $12 million for the Aqua site and turned it into a $220 million urban development, says even with a private entrance at a guardhouse staffed 24-hours a day, Aqua is New Urbanism.

“Our town planners Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany of DPZ are considered the pioneers of New Urbanism,” he stated. “On this 8.5 acre private guarded island, they’ve created a completely walkable town plan with charming tree-lined streets and a nearly half-mile long promenade connecting residents to Aqua’s two community pools, gourmet market, fitness center and spa, business center, childrens’ learning center, two-story Aqua club room, concierge and valet services. So yes, Aqua is New Urbanism, but with its focus on luxury living, its proximity to Bal Harbour, South Beach, the world famous Miami Beaches, we like to call it Tropical Urbanism.”

Wright is an award-winning journalist who has written about growth, development, architecture, town planning and urban issues for more than a decade. He lives and works in a traditional, walkable, sustainable community in a restored historic home in the heart of Miami’s Little Havana