Wynwood Live-Work
82 NW 28th Street, Wynwood Miami
2019
Coherent city fabric relies on buildings that define streets, plazas, or other critical urban configurations of the public realm. These buildings act as a stage for the spectacle of urban life. This role – a most critical one, does not preclude these buildings from being actors in their own right – worthy of attention on their own terms. The fast urbanism of Wynwood acknowledges this dual responsibility for architecture. As a producer of legible urban space, Wynwood’s “Public Benefits Program” of mid-rise density fills up blocks with building mass, develops legible streets, paseos, parks, and plazas. As to embracing architecture’s capacity to create its own attention, this project assumes that the façade, an ages-old Architectural typology is the true urban thespian.
This building is conceived as a lucid cubic structure, a platonic architectural element. With four sides, it accommodates urban abutments (the west party wall) and creates three facades: one front façade for 28th Street, a side façade for a midblock paseo, and a rear façade for a courtyard. Each façade is a variant of orderly grids. The front façade on 28th Street is the most open and most stable: a six-bay frame with the main entry centered on its middle column. The east paseo has a side façade with a five-bay frame shifted towards the back of the building to support the primacy of the front face while allowing the rear façade some presence. The rear façade acknowledges its more private context and shifts its five-bay frame into the corner against the abutting property – away from the public paseo. All three facades link together to form a continuous urban surface – uniting public with private. The two corners in-between these façades serve as excavations into the mass of the building allowing the frames to fold over to the next surface. These compositional manipulations provide the attentive viewer with an architecture that plays with the interactions of openings, frames, and walls – the ingredients of a building façade.
The building program mixes ground floor retail with open plan office space and living units. Six stories tall the first floor is retail, the second and third floors are office space, the fourth and fifth floor are live-work spaces and the sixth floor is an event space. The building is a total of 50,000 square feet in size.
Project Team
Jason R. Chandler, A.I.A.
Zalmy Meyer