Faena Forum Miami Beach Building, OMA Florida Property Photos, Design USA

Faena Forum Miami Beach Building

Oceanfront Architecture in Florida design by OMA, Architects

Nov 28, 2016

Faena Forum Miami Beach Building News

Location: Miami Beach, Florida, USA

Design: OMA New York ; Architect of record: Revuelta Architecture International

Faena Forum Miami Beach Building by OMA

The Faena Forum, a cultural center designed by OMA New York, has been charged with bringing enlightenment to a new development in the midst of this famous Florida resort city, reports the Architectural Record.

Photos: Iwan Baan

In 2011, Argentinian hotelier and developer Alan Faena, with his partner Len Blavatnik, purchased a six-block parcel in Miami Beach.

Bisected by Collins Avenue, the property occupies a sliver of land in Mid-Beach, squeezed between the Atlantic Ocean and Indian Creek—an area that had struggled as the adjacent South Beach underwent its renaissance.

With the Argentine economy suffering, the developer’s eponymous Faena Group embarked on a plan to create the Faena District in Miami. Modeled after his recently completed development in Buenos Aires’s Puerto Madero Waterfront, the project aims to breathe new life into the precinct by creating a “neighborhood” centered on art and culture.

Faena recruited British architects Foster + Partners to design a luxury condominium tower, Faena House (2015), and called on producer/ director Baz Luhrmann and his partner and wife, film producer and designer Catherine Martin, to conceive interiors for the 1948 Saxony Hotel in its new incarnation as the Faena Hotel Miami Beach.

For the final three lots, on the Indian Creek side, Faena wanted to make a special cultural center as the heart of the complex and enlisted OMA New York to create the Faena Forum, with programming by the nonprofit FAENA ART. The commission included reinventing the low-slung 1939 Atlantic Beach Hotel to the north and designing a parking garage next to that.