Welcome to Miami, my name is Terence Riley.
I was the director of the Miami Art Museum recently for the four years where we were
in the design process for the new building and for quite a while before that I was the
chief curator for architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
We are now downtown.
We're right by the river, the late 19th century, early 20th century commercial hub.
At a certain point in the city's history, the developers and their clients and the tenants
needed bigger spaces.
The net effect was a real emptying out of the downtown.
And eventually you saw empty stores, empty office buildings, and it was really then across
the river south that all the development began in the 70s.
What's happening now, and we'll see it repeatedly around the core, is that what were empty lots
are beginning to be redeveloped.
There is the old post office.
It sat empty for a dozen years.
The American Institute of Architects has moved in.
They are going to have what's called the Miami Center for Architecture and Design.
And the first move to improve this piece of the core was the county building right there,
and that was designed by Hugh Stubbins from Boston.
And across from it was the cultural complex, which was designed by Philip Johnson, included
the old Miami Art Museum.
This is a very familiar tactic.
You take a really lousy neighborhood.
What do you do?
There are cultural facilities there because they'll go anywhere, those people.
And so Miami Art Museum, from its earliest days, was put into this situation of trying
to be a kind of catalyst for spurring development in downtown.
If you think of Miami, it was laid out as a kind of pedestrian city.
You can see these buildings coming up on the left.
They would have had these arcades that would have protected people from the rain and from
the sun.
Miami lost a lot of that common sense kind of construction with air conditioning, with
underground garages where you go directly from your car into the building.
I think a lot of people in Miami thought of Miami as a really hot place where you need
mirrored glass, and they lived this kind of air conditioned life 12 months a year.
Now I think actually the attitude is changing.
They're starting to see it as a place that, for much of the year, is a very desirable
climate.
And you see that reflected in all the outdoor cafes and things like bike riding and the
like.
And the whole idea that you can live downtown now, shop downtown and have restaurants downtown
is something completely new.
You'll notice on the Herzog & DeMiro Art Museum these long, broad, overhanging eaves that
provide protection all the way around the museum recalling some of the more thoughtful,
intelligent things that they used to do in the traditional city.
You make people want to be outside, you make it as enjoyable as possible.
I think in a certain sense this represents Miamians coming back to why they came here
in the first place.
