La amalgama del sector no-lucrativo / comunitario / voluntario

Figure 2.42: Artist illustration, 1920. Depicts County Causeway and Government Cut to the right side with density progressing northwards around the golf course and polo fields

The growth of Miami Beach, both as a vacation destination and as a place to live, created the need for more development. On South Beach, dozens of small hotels were built quickly and cheaply on the empty lots of Collins Avenue and Ocean Drive.⁶⁴ The architects designed them to be easy to build, and decorated only the street side of the buildings, using a new streamlined look that was gaining popularity. Between 1934 and 1940, hundreds of new hotels and apartment buildings, large and small, were built—most designed by relatively unknown architects who would remain obscure until they were posthumously discovered in the late 1970s.⁶⁵ In Miami Beach, these changes occurred within only ten to fifteen years of its initial development and began to reflect a modern streamlined imagery.

2.8. ART DECO AND THE REIMAGINING OF MIAMI BEACH

Through the devastation of the 1926 Hurricane and the Great Depression,

entrepreneurs once again saw opportunity in Miami Beach, much like the pioneer developers of Miami Beach. A relatively blank slate had returned the area to one that could be molded into the most fashionable, yet affordable architectural styles of the time. Fisher, a believer in the machine age that would later inspire the modern architects of the 1930s, established Miami Beach’s fundamental relationship between landscape and machine. It was a city built

64 Stofik, 16; An economy-minded couple could get a hotel room for $8 a day or opt for the “American plan,” which included breakfast and dinner, for $11 a day. If they had a few extra dollars, they could hop on a plane for a quick visit to Havana for

$36, round trip.

65 Kleinberg, 128; A new high school, Ida M. Fisher, opened at 1420 Drexel Avenue; South Beach Elementary opened at Lenox Avenue between Third and Fourth Streets; North Beach Elementary was completed at 41^st Street between Prarie and Chase Avenues.

for the automobile and the environment was viewed as something to be manipulated and controlled to achieve real estate aims.⁶⁶

2.8.1. Art Deco influences

Art Deco had been a recognized design since its introduction at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925, although the term “Art Deco” didn’t enter the architectural lexicon until 1966, when it was devised by a writer doing a catalog for a retrospective of the Paris show.⁶⁷ Architects looking for a new form of expression, especially after the damage seen in World War I, quickly adapted modernist design elements. As stated in From Wilderness to Metropolis, “Forms came under different labels: the German Bauhaus, the Dutch De Stijl, the Russian Constructivism all had the same back-to-basics simplicity in their architectural vocabulary as a trademark.”⁶⁸ In order to harmonize with a tourist-centric architecture, the thoughts of the 1908 Ornament and Crime by Adolf Loos, and influences of International Style architects such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, Miami Beach sought to define it’s own architectural vocabulary between these two extremes. The resulting aesthetics were intended as a compromise between the intended audience and architectural styles of the time. In Miami Beach, the higher Art Deco from the Paris show was tempered into an austere hybrid of modernism.

2.8.2. Art Deco in Miami Beach

Architects created a streamlined style that was inspired by the automobile, the train, the ocean liner, and the airplane. As Paul Golderberger highlights in his forward to The Making of Miami Beach: 1933-1942, Miami Beach’s art modern architecture was

66 Miami Beach was also design for yachting and a variety of airplanes, which happened to be other passions of Fisher.

67 The first Art Deco skyscrapers began appearing on New York’s skyline in 1929.

68 Rodgriguez, et. al., 148.

“fantasy tempered by geometry.”⁶⁹ The outlandish Mediterranean eclectic styles simply became too expensive in the midst of a national economic depression. New materials, such as Vitrolite, chrome, stainless steel, and glass block, allowed designers to combine the functional aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts movement with improved industrial technology.⁷⁰ Bright colors, influenced by the surrounding landscape, projected green, blue, orange and pink trims projected from the beige and white backgrounds of the streamlined modernism.

Figure 2.43: Art Deco architecture in the Miami Beach Architectural District

In order to maximize economy, projects used massing, rounded corners, horizontal fenestration and racing stripes, and flat parapet roofs to achieve angularity. Hundreds of Miami Beach buildings, including most apartment houses and hotels, are derived from the Art Deco style to this day, providing a low-scale continuity of exterior forms and hierarchies.

It was in the post-Depression 1930s that Miami Beach achieved the definitive form and iconic imagery for which it is noted. Its architects created an urban and architectural transformation that accommodated new building typologies. Lawrence Murray Dixon, Henry Hohauser, Roy France, Anton Skislewicz, Albert Anis and others, were responsible for a large number of buildings, each becoming a visionary of the new city.⁷¹ These architects were predominately middle-class professionals who designed vernacular residences, apartment buildings, and hotels in the humble modernism of the time.⁷² Especially in South

69 Lejeune and Shulman, 7.

70 Famous Art Deco designs gained notoriety with New York City’s Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and the Chicago Board of Trade.

71 Lejeune and Shulman, 21.

72 Rodriguez, et.al., 153.

Beach, the sum of these structures is greater than any individual achievement, and the ensemble remains exemplary among 20^th century American architecture.

Figure 2.44: Architectural renderings of Crescent Hotel, Ocean Drive, by Henry Hohauser, 1938, and Governor Hotel, 435 21st Street, Henry Hohauser, 1940.

2.8.3. Increased tourism and urbanization

Miami Beach’s population soared from 6,500 in 1930 to 28,000 by the end of the decade and ballooned to 75,000 during the winter tourist season.⁷³ The grand hotels were landmarks and icons of the city’s real estate development. This generated residential demand for single-family homes and estates.⁷⁴ The subsequent construction of houses spanned many years and architectural styles. Variations in lot size and orientation yielded a varied image of the American suburb, contrary to the denser urban fabric to the south of Lincoln Road.

One impetus for new housing models was the increasing density of South Beach. The process of infilling diminished the amount of open space and in less than a decade urbanism triumphed. Ignited by a national housing shortage and war-era reforms programs, the progress of European housing and the German Siedlungen model in particular were

introduced to Americans in the late 1920s, as well as exhibits such as the Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 International Style Exhibition.⁷⁵ The ideas were further elaborated by the Housing Division of the Public Works Administration, which built low-cost housing after the

Depression and in 1935 codified and published model plans and type configurations for new

73 Stofik, 16;

74 As one brochure described it, hotel builders “selected a point far from the developed sections, moving materials and men to the point, proceeded to build first the grounds, then the building, sometimes a half-million dollar project—oftentimes more, and then awaited the building of the city around the hotel;” Florida Editors Associated, The Book of Florida: An Illustrated description of the advantages and opportunities of the State of Florida and the progress that has been achieved with a biographical record of those citizens whose endeavor has produced the superb structure (Florida Editors Association, 1925), 67-68.

75 Lejeune and Shulman, 24-25.

housing stock.⁷⁶ The pressure to compact the maximum amount of uses onto the small lots of Miami Beach propelled the development of mixed-used buildings, particularly at the

intersections of commercial and residential streets.

Figure 2.45: Notice of public hearing of Miami Beach Zoning Commission, May 22, 1930. The commission circulated a proposed ordinance that would prescribe zoning and use regulations.

The 1930s were characterized by urbanization, which also evolved alongside the implementation of planning policies. The advent of municipal zoning in 1933 was integral to the development of more coherent planning and architectural guidelines.⁷⁷ Miami Beach’s zoning prescribed high and low density districts, and regulated setbacks and density.⁷⁸ The new zoning ordinance helped standardize new construction in harmony with existing

structures, although the city’s architects had largely observed these standards since the 1920s without any regulation.