Everything goes dark as you drive through rows of dramatic Easter Island-inspired columns to get to the valet at Icon Brickell, the newest project by über developer Jorge Perez featuring madcap opulence by famed, Paris-born designer Philippe Starck.

Somehow managing not to slip into Epcot territory, the columns, 100 towering heads painted bronze and silver, cancel out Miami's dazzling sunlight and powder-blue sky and make you feel as if you're driving into an ancient, mystical cave. Just like that, your mood has been messed with.

Says Starck: ``When you drive through the big heads, it is a shock. Even for me, and I made them. We went through hundreds of prototypes for two years. We wanted the heads to give a certain evocation. We know somewhere in our memory that they are familiar, but they become an abstraction and that gives timelessness.''

So what if the columns alone cost $15 million? Perez, who calls this three-tower, $1.3 billion project his legacy, gave Starck's imagination carte blanche. Icon Brickell, which sits between the Miami Circle and Brickell Park, opens Friday with an ArtNexus Magazine bash, typically one of the most jam-packed events of the Art Basel Miami Beach weekend. Starck will be honored.

By the time you're floating through the main lobby -- where a strange yellow light glows through tinted windows, unframed reproductions of classical paintings lean against walls and a huge empty frame hangs over a fireplace -- you're feeling like Alice after too much tea.

The giant mirror across the room? Go ahead. Primp in front of it, if you like being watched. Hidden security guards look through the glass into the lobby, where long stretches of white-cushioned benches and gangs of totem-like stools conjure a fantasy that Lewis Carroll is about to call a character meeting to order.

WHITE AFTER WHITE

You haven't even arrived at the tunnels of white light yet. Or, well, the halls with shiny white walls, shiny white floors and shiny white ceilings that lead to the trippy mailroom and the residences.

''When you go past the heads, it is like an initiation,'' says Starck, sitting by the fireplace in the posh ''wet living room'' of Icon's full-service spa, which is open only to residents and guests of the Viceroy Hotel, in the shortest of the towers. The Viceroy tower, by the way, has a rooftop private club where the men's bathroom features glass urinals against floor-to-ceiling windows so that you can flash the skyline from 50 flights above. But this was Perez's touch, not Starck's.

One of Starck's favorite spots at Icon is the wet living room, a sort of uptown Roman bath where you might hang out between spa treatments. This area features dark, floor-to-ceiling wooden library shelves filled with hundreds of books, all in plain white covers, and a giant, bright yellow glass chandelier hanging over a wading pool punctuated by sofas and chairs in the water (a Starck signature) and several plunge pools.

''The more you go inside, the more and more you fly,'' says Starck, driven to hyperbole as he takes in his creation. This is the first time he has seen the completed project. He designed it more than five years ago and hadn't been on site since early in the construction.

''It was gone from my memory. But here, it is clear people are more sexy. More you walk into the building, more you are upgraded,'' he says in his thick French accent. ``I speak about the elegance of intelligence, the sexiness of intelligence. And this building is not for everyone. The people who will want to live here are a smart tribe of people driven by creativity and culture. Here we don't have the classical opulence. There are no gold faucets. It is not about money. We speak only of human value.''

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