Miami has always had an appetite for kitsch. This is especially apparent in South Beach, where Ocean Drive presents a long row of art deco hotels splashed in pastel shades and illuminated by bright neon signage. As we enter the holidays, a few of those buildings have even decorated their patios with life-sized statues of Santa dressed in beach shirts and sipping cocktails out of coconut shells.
It would be hard to move from a sight like that to a design fair full of understated minimalism, so it’s no wonder that Design Miami/ tends to attract designers who favour bold colours and playful forms. Leave the clean-lined industrial designs to other trade shows. When it comes to Miami in December, the crowds come to town for wild spectacles.
That said, don’t mistake the city’s weeklong program of art and design events for a celebration of empty visual excess. Instead, Miami Art Week 2023 demonstrated thoughtful focus on a new breed of sustainable whimsy.
Luxury auto brand Lexus led the charge with a special installation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Envisioned by Dutch solar designer Marjan van Aubel, “8 Minutes and 20 Seconds” captured solar energy by day to deliver a bright spectacle by night.
Powered by organic photovoltaic cells, colourful lights illuminated a group of transparent sheets printed with graphics that recreated the silhouette of the Lexus Future Zero-emission Catalyst (LF-ZC) concept car. (And never have the merits of a comfortable car been more clear than when you’re stuck on the MacArthur Causeway for an hour and a half during Art Basel traffic.) As people walked past the installation, motion sensors triggered dynamic responses from its combination of lights and speakers.
Elsewhere in the Miami Design District, UK-based Bohinc Studio’s bubbly Utopia seating sculptures were another eco-conscious delight. Robotically milled from cork blocks, the mix of pastel-hued stools and benches were grouped into four clusters and will remain on display throughout the tony shopping area for the next year. (A fifth cluster also greeted Design Miami/ attendees on Convention Center Drive).
Adding to Miami’s wealth of cool street furniture, 12 permanent steel benches by British designer Samuel Ross also made their debut in the Design District. This wasn’t Ross’s only big Miami project, either — he was also behind Formation 01, a sculptural Kohler faucet unveiled at Design Miami/. Made of Neolast (a proprietary composite) in an attention-grabbing orange, the angular fixture is limited to an edition of just 299.
The other big story in Miami last week was the arrival of Alcova, the independent design exhibition that has made a name for itself with its edgy, experimental Milan editions each spring. For its first international version, Alcova took over the Selina Miami Gold Dust, a 1950s-era three-storey roadside motel with a courtyard swimming pool.
Rather than requiring exhibitors to build elaborate display booths, this setup allowed designers to showcase their work inside one of 37 different motel rooms. The result was a refreshingly low-waste version of packing a lot of different designs into one location all the while still allowing everyone to express their own individual identities. Indeed, moving in between rooms along the hotel’s exterior corridors made for a refreshing transition between spaces, with the shift from indoors to outdoors creating time to digest and process what you’d just seen before moving onto the next experience — whether that be Natural Material Studio’s wall sconces wrapped in textile created from bio-polymers or the UV-sensitive biopolymer lattice structures made by Crafting Plastics (above).
The team behind the group show “Uncharted” put its room to particularly evocative usage, installing curtains printed with a custom pattern by Wallpaper Projects to create an otherworldly mood that complemented an extraterrestrial pink chandelier by Tristan Louis Marsh (above) and droopy brass mirrors by Forma Rosa Studio.
Alcova’s co-founders said that they selected a motel for the show’s venue in part because the building represents a quintessentially Miami archetype. But perhaps no setting more fully embodies Miami than the beach. On the shoreline behind Faena Hotel Miami Beach, Chilean artist Sebastian Errazuriz built a spectacular sand maze.
Designed to lead to a central nucleus envisioned as a kind of public plaza, the installation was the rare urban intervention that was as compelling in person as it looked online. Its large walls and occasional openings framed the ocean and the city skyline in interesting new ways, while its construction was refreshingly low-cost. (Each of the walls was made of plywood boards that were painted grey and then splashed in sand while still wet.) Watching kids and adults alike emerge from the maze’s corridors into the central clearing made for a refreshing showcase of community space.
Andrés Reisinger’s “Take Over” was another architectural intervention that felt as high impact offline as it looked online. Adapted from Reisinger’s series of digital renderings that depict buildings wrapped in pink curtains, the piece’s construction was simple and yet the outcome created an instant Design District landmark — which is no easy feat in a neighbourhood filled with designer flagships. Every time you passed it, there seemed to be a new person posing in front of the building in a matching pink ensemble.
While Instagram fodder is nothing new at design fairs, there was something that felt appropriate about a digital-turned-physical art series being constantly re-digitized. On a less conceptual level, the opportunity for everyone to get one last hurrah out of their Barbiecore fashions also felt like a fitting sendoff to 2023. (Peach Fuzz, here we come!) Either way, it was hard not to feel charmed by the city’s mix of fun, flashy and refreshingly low-waste interventions.
Scroll through the gallery below for more of Miami Art Week’s standout sights.
Standout launches from Design Miami/ and Alcova, plus a sand maze and a solar-powered Lexus installation by Marjan van Aubel.