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Miami, Florida
You're weightless, you are exotic, you need something for which to care
I have worked at three different architectural firms in my life. The first one I stayed at seven long years and during all that long time it included only one work trip, an all driving trip to the middle of nowhere to see a project site. The second firm included a lot more random travel, with semi regular trips to places like Vancouver and Denver, but nothing compared to the travel that came with the firm that I am at now. It started right from the start but really picked up in 2008 and, for about four or five years, I could expect several random trips a month. Over time firms change, clients change and people change, and this work related trip to Miami already had some pretty clear writing on the wall. While this may not be the very last work related trip I’ll ever take, it feels like it’s among the last for so many reasons. But if you’re looking to go out with a bang, maybe Miami isn’t the worst place to end up.
Miami is home to Cuban sandwiches, Cuban coffee and I’m guessing a lot of Cubans. And while I have been there before, I always stayed at a Miami Beach hotel and not actually in the city. Until now. This is an almost impossible, constructed panorama of one of the perfect views of the city, from the 26th floor of the Kimpton Epic Hotel, my Hotwire hotel located high above the river, with Brickell close enough to (almost) touch.
On top of my list of things to see in Miami itself (and by Miami itself, I mean Miami Miami and not Miami Beach) was a visit to Herzog & de Meuron's still new Pérez Art Museum. The building itself is not even the strongest Herzog & de Meuron designed museum building from this slideshow, but it's not without its charms. The outside features a large extended open air trellis marked by vertical, hanging pendant planters. Inside the museum was nice but not spectacular, and the art was inside was (to put it kindly) unimpressive. Maybe I just hit them on a bad day and all the good art was out on loan to a better museum. Trying to be positive here.
One of two Zaha Hadid buildings under construction that is featured in this slideshow, the tower at 1000 Museum shows great promise. The residential tower has a great site on the park near the Pérez Art Museum and its terrible, terrible art collection (still trying to be positive), although I guess that won't matter as much when all of Miami and most of coastal Florida is underwater and infested with angry sharks due to the adverse effects of climate change. At least you'll be safe on one of the upper floors, and regardless you'll be in better shape than Zaha herself- she (sadly) died in Miami this past March on a site visit.
What kind of zoo allows you to spend a little extra money to be in a cage with one of their animals? If you said no zoo would do that, you forgot about the Palm Beach Zoo, where an in cage koala experience awaits all who will sign a waiver, wear closed toe shoes and are lucky enough to get a reservation.
The koala experience was a delayed birthday gift for my koala obsessed niece, and it was delayed for a pretty good reason. Back in April 2016, the woman who took care of the koala and tiger ran into some trouble. She was known as the "tiger whisperer" but must have whispered something terribly wrong one day- she was attacked and killed by one of her own tigers for reasons that only the tiger and basic logic can ever explain. The zoo went into a summer long period of mourning and investigations, and it took some time longer before they decided to resume their signature animal experience program. The actual in-cage time with the koala (about a half hour) was exceptionally memorable, the normally sleepy koala was awake the entire time and even crawled across a log, although that might have been because he was desperately trying to get away from us.
We’re back in New York visiting Gordon Bunshaft's Lever House, one of the great buildings in the cityand one of the most influential ever built. Although I have walked by it countless time ("countless" is likely a gross exaggeration- who really needs to go over to that part of Park Avenue more than a few times a year, if that), I had never been inside. The building tour was awesome in the sense that they took us up to a few of the tower floors and then let us loose on the terrace and on the open second floor. The tour guide however was pretty useless. He was an SOM guy who read an index card of Wikipedia level facts at the start of the tour, told us that he knew nothing else about the Lever House and then said nothing else as we were allowed to wander about on our own.
Even with a pretty useless tour guide, it’s hard not to have a great time visiting views and spaces like this. We visited a working office on an upper floor (no photos because people were actually working), and then spent some quality time inside and on top of the podium, floating above Park Avenue and bathed in all of that green, green, green glass.
We’re still on Park Avenue but now 12 blocks north at the Park Avenue Armory to see An Occupation of Loss by Taryn Simon. It’s an impressive art exhibition at a scale just right for the giant hall at the armory. Each of the big tubes are occupiable but not comfortable, which I think is probably at least part of the point.
