South Beach ACE, the collaborative team made up of Tishman, a national real estate development firm led by Dan Tishman; international architecture firm OMA, led by Pritzker Prize winning architect Rem Koolhaas; and Miami Beach developer Robert Wennett, were just announced by the Miami Beach City Commission as the winning team in a competition to redevelop the Miami Beach Convention Center and the surrounding 52-acre site. Looking forward to bring the project to fruition, the team firmly believes a renovated convention center, adjacent hotel, and re-imagined convention center campus are critical to Miami Beach's ability to maintain and grow its desirability as a tourism and convention destination. More images and the team's description after the break.
Sitting on 52 acres within the vibrant and unique community that is Miami Beach, an outdated convention center acts as an urban blockade – inactive when conventions are not in town, disruptive to adjoining neighborhoods and inhibiting connections to Lincoln Road and surrounding communities.
By conceptually rotating the convention center, their design is able to reorient the site to allow for east-west neighborhood connectivity and a southerly orientation for both convention center and hotel guests. We concentrate the density at the center of the site and make the revamped convention center and its meeting and ballroom space contiguous with the hotel – a feature that meeting planners love
We re-imagine the area’s existing assets: the Jackie Gleason Theater, the Carl Fisher Clubhouse, City Hall, the 17th Street Garage and 17th Street itself are all maintained and transformed to better engage their surroundings while keeping the character of Miami Beach. We fill the rest of the site with public amenities and programmed uses appropriate to activate the space 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
In short, our plan upgrades the convention center into a best-in-class facility and weaves the entire convention center site into the fabric of Miami Beach. It will feel both new and like it was always there.
