A Miami arts group hires rising stars from Spain to design its new Little Haiti home
Oolite Arts, the organization formerly known as ArtCenter/South Florida, played a key role in the revival of Miami Beach’s once-forlorn Lincoln Road Mall.
Armed with an $88 million windfall from the sale of one of its two Lincoln Road buildings, the renamed 36-year-old non-profit now hopes to do the same for an industrial corner of Miami’s Little Haiti/Little River neighborhood, where a year ago it purchased a warehouse property for nearly $4 million.
On Wednesday, Oolite formally announced the first step in realizing its ambitions for the site, which abuts the train tracks of Florida East Coast Railway’s east-west spur: It hired a firm run by two young, up-and-coming Barcelona-based architects to design a new $30 million complex of artists’ studios and more.
It would be the first U.S. building by Barozzi Veiga, a firm whose sober but inventive designs for cultural facilities have made them rising stars in Europe. The firm, led by principals Fabrizio Barozzi and Alberto Veiga, is known for carefully fitting designs to their surroundings, so that no two of their buildings look the same.
It’s that quality that helped the architects win the Miami job from a list of about a dozen firms that Oolite considered, said the group’s president and CEO, Dennis Scholl.
“Our selection committee knew going in that they wanted a couple of things,” Scholl said, “First, a firm that would create a signature building that was going to be responsive to the neighborhood. Each of their projects is different, and they all seemed to be in harmony with their neighborhoods. You have to look for that kind of firm.
“And they wanted a firm that had done a lot of cultural buildings.”
The architects should not find the location next to a freight-train line especially challenging. In Lausanne, Switzerland, they designed a museum next to busy railway tracks. And in Zurich, they built a dance school into the banks of a river.
Their bright white, peaked-roof Philharmonic Hall in Szczecin, Poland, won the 2015 Mies van der Rohe Prize, given by the European Union to the continent’s best contemporary building design.
Barozzi Veiga was recently hired by the Art Institute of Chicago to design a new master plan for the modernization of the massive museum.
The overlapping Little River-Little Haiti neighborhoods have become home to numerous art galleries and arts groups looking for relatively inexpensive warehouses and commercial buildings, including several pushed out of Wynwood by rising rents and land prices.
Oolite’s planned 35,000-square-foot building in Miami would replace the Beach building the organization sold. Oolite retains, for now, a second Lincoln Road building that has artists’ studios, small exhibitions spaces and the group’s offices.
Scholl said the new building will house about two dozen studios for the group’s residency program, in which artists get free use of a studio for up to two years. It would also have exhibition space, a theater for films and lectures or presentations, a “maker space” with equipment for complicated fabrications, offices and “some other things that will be interesting,” he said.
Oolite has also asked its new architects to develop a garden or community space to integrate the new buildings with the outdoors. The organization hopes to open the building in 2022.
The existing warehouse on the 56,000-square-foot property, at 75 NW 72nd St., will be demolished.
Barozzi Veiga will collaborate on the building with Miami architect Charles Benson, who worked with Swiss star architects Herzog & de Meuron on their design for the 1111 Lincoln Road garage.
This story was originally published February 19, 2020 at 6:00 AM.