WORKac’s Ant Farm and J. Mayer H’s XOX facades at Museum Garage, Miami.
Photo: Miguel de Guzman
When you think of a parking garage, the first image that usually comes to mind is that of a dark alleyway mostly filled with concrete columns and bad overhead lighting. “Garages are the least attractive structures, and yet, you see them everywhere,” said Craig Robins, the CEO of Dacra Development and the visionary behind the Design District, an art, fashion, and architectural playground near Downtown Miami. On Tuesday, Robins unveiled the latest project in his one-of-a-kind neighborhood: Museum Garage, a seven-story building with vastly differing facades designed by five different architects that can house up to 800 cars. “We wanted to turn a parking garage into the most interesting structure in Miami,” he explained at the project’s opening ceremony at the Institute of Contemporary Art.
Robins commissioned Terence Riley, a former chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA, to oversee the project. As a starting point, Riley was inspired by an old parlor game invented by the Surrealists called Cadavre Exquis, or Exquisite Corpse, in which one artist draws on a piece of paper, folds it back, and then passes it on to the next. None of the artists know what the prior has done, nor do they know what the next in the circle will do. For Museum Garage, Riley hired four architectural and design firms, plus commissioned his own firm, K/R, to work on individual “slices” of the facade of the building, without letting anyone know their position in the overall landscape or even who their work would be placed next to.
Clavel Arquitectos’s Urban Jam
Photo: Miguel de Guzman
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Instead of balking at the proposition, each of the architects and artists jumped at the opportunity to work on such an unorthodox project. For some, automobiles and traffic ended up figuring as a major source of inspiration. Berlin-based J. Mayer H abstracted the shapes of car lights into a colorful, puzzle-like design titled XOX, which used automotive paint striping. Riley’s K/R firm started with those inescapable orange-and-white traffic barriers used to close off streets during construction work as a jumping off point for its striped Barricades facade made out of mirrored stainless steel and concrete planters. Manuel Clavel of Clavel Arquitectos explained his desire to make a bad commute more bearable by turning a driver’s final destination, the garage, into a happier place. Inspired by the mind-bending Christopher Nolan movie Inception, Clavel placed 45 metallic cars into a vertical traffic jam on his facade, appropriately titled Urban Jam.
K/R’s Barricades
Photo: Miguel de Guzman
The remaining two other spaces took on an even more playful approach. New York-based firm WORKac created a large-scale “ant farm” and designed a 3-D landscape in bright “Miami pink” that includes an art gallery, bar, and playground at the end of several corridors that are visible from the outside (the resulting illusion is of people moving along like tiny insects). Nicolas Buffe, a French artist residing in Tokyo, was inspired by European Baroque paintings and Japanese anime and illustrated several black-and-white cartoon renderings of elephants, gargoyles, and caryatids made out of metal and fiber resin plastic for his take, Serious Play.
Nicolas Buffe’s Serious Play
Photo: Miguel de Guzman
As the celebration for Museum Garage came to an end, guests of the event made their way out of the Institute of Contemporary Art and onto the street where the lit-up facades awaited their big Instagram moment. And, as if on cue, as everyone started snapping away photos, holding up their phones to the building, one bewildered pedestrian could be overheard asking, “Yes, but what is it?”
