Led by Adib Cúre & Carie Penabad with Deborah Garcia
Miami, currently the most unaffordable major city in America, faces a housing crisis with limited and unsuitable options for its growing needs. The city is dominated by detached single-family homes and high-rise condos, contributing to suburban sprawl and high land costs. Mid-rise housing models, offering innovative urban living solutions, have been largely overlooked.
The studio's task was twofold: to propose a master plan for a 38-acre vacant parcel on the outskirts of Little Havana, addressing Miami’s urban morphology, and to design a new mid-rise urban housing typology for Miami, featuring mixed-use buildings with commercial/office spaces at ground level and various apartment types above.
To Tackle these issues, which characterize Miami but are not limited to, the project operates at a wide range of scales, from the single room to the urban fabric, promoting an approach of open-ended locality. This combines consideration of climate, materiality, culture, and economy with flexible, rational, and modular architectural solutions.
The Unit
Instead of conventional drywall partitions, the project incorporates a modular furniture system that maximizes usable open space and provides flexibility. These modules can serve as walls, partitions, storage spaces, or even house plumbing fixtures. The variety and placement of these modules enable different floor plan configurations, allowing the housing units to be divided into two separate units—a main apartment and a studio—or to modify the internal layout of the apartment itself.
The central open living space is designed to respond to and take advantage of the local tropical climate. Drawing inspiration from traditional and vernacular tropical architecture, deep loggias and shaders provide protection from the harsh sun during certain hours, while also serving as outdoor rooms that integrate the outdoors into daily life. The central living space opens up to the loggias, creating a cross-ventilated indoor-outdoor environment.
The Building
In the project, we developed a mid-rise courtyard infill type. While the flexible zoning system allows multiple typologies, we chose to develop an infill building since Miami currently lacks this type. Furthermore, we believe that infill typologies offer potentials in terms of high density, and the sort of streets they generate.
Inspired by similar typologies like the Berlin courtyard houses, the Mexican Vecindad, and the Creole townhouses, we created a local interpretation that reacts to the regional tropical climate and contemporary Miami standards. On one single lot, two relatively thin volumes are positioned, leaving a space for a central courtyard. The interior rooms, which have two orientations, are cross-ventilated and naturally cooled. The building is designed using repetitive modules, thus increasing affordability, efficiency, and making it easy to construct. Through sensitivity to details, use of materials, and small, subtle architectural gestures, these are realized without sacrificing architectural and spatial quality.
The building is divided into two distinct sections: “service” wings; housing private rooms, and an open flexible central “served” space. These sections are treated differently in terms of materials and construction techniques. The service wings hold all systems, structure, and storage, allowing the central area to remain free of these elements. This central space features light concrete precast vaulted slabs, which give the building its unique architectural character. The thicker floor sections in the service wings provide flexibility for plumbing fixtures, enabling them to drain through the floors to the vertical pipes that are located along the party walls – maximizing flexibility and allowing multiple apartment layouts.
The Room is the Building is the City:
An open-Ended Approach to Miami’s Housing Crisis
The City
Due to its limitations and restrictions, Miami's current zoning, led by its parking regulation, makes building complicated and expensive. The market lacks competition, which makes the housing unaffordable and attracts mainly big developers, prioritizes profit-making over building and architectural quality. The typical development project is done by conglomerating lots to develop ‘luxurious’ huge-scale anti-urban and anti-social residential compounds.
By suggesting a much more flexible and open alternative zoning system and limiting the conglomeration of lots, the project seeks to invite multiple players to participate in the city's future development, creating quality, affordable, and diverse urban spaces and housing stock.
Additionally, the project proposes a series of site-specific design decisions: To connect the site to Miami’s urban fabric, we decided to continue the grid through the site and divide it into urban blocks similar in size to the adjacent blocks, then divide each block into lots in the typical Miami lot size: 50* 100 feet. Learning from successful urban spaces in the city, we propose a series of pedestrian streets and a linear park connecting all blocks from south to north.
