MIAC, Miami Art Center.

Setup

MIAC, the Miami Art Center, is a 35,000-square-foot art warehouse in Allapattah by KODA, designed inside a former produce market. The design keeps the market's bones and wraps them in a gabion facade built from fragments of demolished buildings.

oaki produced the project's renderings in 2023.

Tension

Adaptive reuse is an argument about material memory, and material memory is hard to photograph before it exists. The gabion facade only works if you can see what it is made of; a render that flattens it into texture loses the whole idea. The images had to carry the concept at two distances at once: the block, and the fragment.

Approach

The set runs from the block to the stone. The facade opens the sequence at urban scale, the entry and sidewalk frames bring it to street level, and the closing macro puts the demolished-building fragments in front of the viewer at arm's length. Street life stays restrained: enough to place the building in Allapattah, never enough to crowd it.

Outcome

At the 2023 AIA Miami Design Awards, MIAC won a Merit Award of Excellence in the Unbuilt category, a category where the images are how the jury meets the building. Sources: the AIA Miami 2023 Design Awards listing and KODA's award page.

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