The Miami Sun

This is a competition entry for a new landmark at the Bayfront Park in Miami where the participants where asked to capture the soul of Miami as well as giving the city a fresh and innovative icon that would boost Miami's architectural legacy.

Background
Miami is located in the Sunshine State of Florida and is a city that is blessed with a tropical climate and great weather almost all year around, making it a major tourist destination and a popular place to retire.
The city of Miami that we know of today is a reclaimed city in many ways.
The land where most of the downtown area is, used to be a part of the Everglades wetland, but was drained to create land opportunities.
A major part of the city was also created by landfill with the dredging of Biscayne Bay. The majority of Miami Beach is mainly created in this way and this is also the case for the many islands that lies between Miami Beach and the downtown area, such as the port of Miami for example, which is the base for the enormous cruise ships that has their embarkation point from this area.
These ships are own little islands in themselves and Miami is the number one cruise port in the world.
The tradition of creating new spaces from water leads to a pretty unsentimental and interesting approach to landscaping as well as architecture.
The Bayfront Park which is the setting for this new proposed landmark was also created in this traditional way to free new spaces, in this case by setting up a retaining wall and pumping out sea water.


Siteplan, facade and axonometric view


Site overview 


View from the harbor

The Idea
The new landmark is both a monument of the good life, as well as a landscape addition to enrich and counter balance the existing park with its already tropical landscaping.
The new monument is a thin, half sphere-shaped hotel with a casino on its lower floors and an observation deck on its upper floors, which gradually shifts its colors during the day, mimicking a dimmed sun at daytime and creating spectacular sunrises and blazing sunsets for the park at dusk and dawn. At night time it shifts to a moon.
The sun and the tropical archipelago will be a relaxed and positive monument that many people also can enjoy physically and that symbolize both the laid back way of the Miami lifestyle as well as the flamboyant decadence.
This tropical vista will attract many visitors, and the Bayfront Park will receive more people as a result, which is what this park lacks when there is not an event going on here. People will hopefully flock once again to the front porch of Miami to catch a relaxing tropical sunset or listening to house music and drinking coconut drinks on a small tropical island next to a huge moon.


Daytime view from the Port of Miami


Aerial view of the building and the observation deck

The building and the water park
The building is reached by tender boats just like the nearby cruise ships has when they anchor in small harbours. This seclusion enhances the monumentality and the sun illusion and also heightens the exclusiveness of the hotel itself aswell as state its energy independence.
The sites close vicinity with the cruises makes this a great destination for cruise tourists that normally have a couple of days in Miami before sailing out on their Caribbean adventures.

The building is a grid shell structure with a glass facade that is coated with a film of transparent solar panels.
This is a new technique which is possible by letting the visible spectra of sun light straight through, and instead absorbing the high amount of ultravilolet and infrared light.
This energy is more than enough to power the building and the surplus goes to the stripes of mono-frequency lights that are integrated on the end of each floor slab and that points outwards to give a glow around the hotel and make the sun effect sharp and bright at dusk and dawn.
Mono-frequency lamps are powerful lights that produce light with a narrow frequency that makes colors other than black and the chosen color invisible.
This makes the surrounding tinted with that specific color and creates an enchanted atmosphere around the building.
At daytime the lamps will be slightly dimmed just to create a shimmering and reflective effect.
At night it glows milky white like a moon.


Section with explanatory diagram


The sun


The moon

The water park between the existing park and the new hotel is made up by a large shallow pool that surrounds a small archipelago with landscaped small sand islands with palm trees on them.
The sand is taken from different popular beaches around the Caribbean so you can sample the best sand from Miami’s neighbours without leaving the city.
The pools are only waist deep so you can wade to the islands and also use the whole premise as a spectacular arena for the Ultra Music Festival and other venues.
The pool could also be completely dried out if needed for any special type of event.

Souvenir City

A close friend to the firm got a praying mantis for his birthday.
The praying mantis is a quite bestial creature that devours its prey very slowly, holding its catch firmly with its spiked forelegs while gradually working its way through the body of the still alive critter.
The primary prey of a mantis consists of animals not so much smaller in size from the mantis itself, ranging from crickets to small birds and frogs.
The mating is also a cruel affair regularly ending up with the female biting off the male’s head during the act.

The new owner of this fascinating pet wanted help to create a habitat that could suit this mini-monster.
Our friend also wanted an enclosure that would look good in his livingroom.

Being an architect at visiondivision means that you travel a lot. Both to meet clients all around the world as well as getting inspiration to produce heroic first-hand architecture.
A couple of years ago we began to collect souvenir buildings from places we’ve been to, resulting in a quite impressive collection of an all-star team of miniature landmarks.
When we then got asked to help out with the new mantis home, we quickly come to the conclusion that a monster needs an inspiring and iconic domain to fully reach its monster potential.
King Kong had a suitable match in Manhattan and Godzilla had Tokyo as its playground.
So the miniature monster got a miniature metropolis to evoke fear and agony in, without any superhero that stands in its way.


Map showing where some of the souvenir buildings was collected.


The Souvenir CIty comes with a great geometric variety that the praying mantis can make use of in its life.

The Souvenir City provides a variety of geometric forms and materials that suits the different needs and the different events that occurs in the life of a praying mantis. After a couple of weeks of studies, we saw a behavior pattern and that the praying mantis had found some favorite spots in the city already.

Food
The Praying Mantis will be fed mostly with crickets, which have a tendency to climb to the highest points in the city, making it an easy target for the mantis when luring around the spire of the Empire State Building for example.
Sometimes the Mantis will also be fed with bugs found in the client’s house and garden, like spiders and such, which have other hiding techniques than the crickets but still highly attractive as food for the mantis.
These prefer to hide in souvenir buildings with cavities, like the Coliseum and the Pantheon or buildings with dramatic shapes like the Casa da Musica or the CCTV building.

Water
The souvenir buildings where water has a central role, will also have real water in or around them, so the Praying Mantis can drink.
These include the Panama Canal, the Marina Sands Bay Hotel and the Fontana di Trevi for example, as well as many of the souvenir bridges that can be found around the city.

Molting
The Praying Mantis sheds its skin many times during their lifespan, and to do this they need a geometry like the St Louis Arch which suits this aspect perfectly.

Guidance
Many mantis males fly during the night to avoid getting caught by birds and to find less-mobile females to mate.
Some of the souvenir buildings have artificial lights that makes their nocturnal travels easier and that also have the advantage that the light attracts their prey so they can have a night snack.

Mating
The sexual cannibalism that occurs during the mating act is a well-studied, but not completely understood behavior. The male have a much better chance to survive when dismounting the female (this is when the risk of getting eaten is the highest) at the Empire State Building than he would at the Pentagon for example, because of the greater chance for the female to catch a prey at the New York skyscraper than the flat and low lying Washington landmark which hardly sees any critters.

Egg Laying
The female lays between 10 and 400 eggs, depending on the species.
The eggs are capsuled in an egg mass called ootheca and often attached on a rather flat surface, like the just mentioned Pentagon or the St Peter’s square which portico makes a nice protective frame to the ootheca.

The Hatchlings
Apart from the many great landmarks, the Souvenir City also consists of many small souvenir buildings as well, a majority being touristy ceramic cottages from different parts of Europe. These enclaves of smaller conurbations with its many alleys makes a perfect hideout for the baby mantis when they are hatched, so they won’t get eaten right away by their parents. Here they will also find smaller prey that suits the size of their appetite just right.

So now there is a small city in our friend's livingroom, with its own little monster in it.


The praying mantis at the US Capitol Building where she later laid an ootheca.


The primary food has a tendency to seek the highest spots in the Souvenir City making them easy prey for the mantis.




Mantis screening the area from the KL Tower.


Petronas Towers, a great place for the molting phase.


This cardboard version of the Statue of Liberty has many hiding spots for the prey.


But the patience of the Mantis is endless.




The Mantis on her way to the Fontana di Trevi to replenish her water levels.


A habitat worthy a mini-monster.


Souvenir City from above with the mantis at the Statue of Liberty.

Global investigations

The team is temporarily doing architectural research in Panama and Uzbekistan for a couple of weeks. We can be reached via e-mail as usual.

Hideaway Preview

Here is a preview of our latest commission which is a refurbishment of an apartment in central Stockholm that involves certain hidden features
Full coverage of the project will appear later in spring.
/The Management

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More glory for Chop Stick

Chop Stick has been selected as one of the five finalist under the Public category by the readers of Archdaily from close to 3,000 projects and with more than 40,000 nominations.
Its now in the final voting stage and you can vote until 13th of February. Click here to vote!

Korea Media Spree

A small outburst of media requests from particularly South Korea, has led to various publications of visiondivision projects that now can be seen in glossy magazines that are for sale on the streets of Seoul, Busan, Incheon and Daegu for example.
Below are two magazines that you can get your hands on if you are in the area and both have extensive features of Chop Stick.
우리는 거기 우리의 한국어 팬들에게 인사를하고 싶은 말!

Praise to Chop Stick

Chop Stick was chosen as one of 2012's top ten projects in the world, in the public spaces category by Designboom. Thank you!

Chop Stick

Visiondivision was commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art to create an innovative concession stand for the 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park.

The design is based on the universal notion that you need to sacrifice something in order to make something new. Every product is a compound of different pieces of nature, whether it is a cell phone, a car, a stone floor or a wood board; they have all been harvested in one way or another. Our project is about trying to harvest something as gently as possible so that the source of what we harvest is displayed in a pure, pedagogic and respectful way—respectful to both the source itself and to everyone visiting the building.

The raw material we selected is a 100-foot yellow poplar tree, the state tree of Indiana, known for its beauty, respectable size, and good properties as hardwood. We found a great specimen standing in a patch of forest outside of Anderson, Indiana. Our goal was to make the best out of this specific poplar tree, from taking it down and through the whole process of transforming it into a useful building that is now part of one of the finest art parks in the United States. As the project proceeded, we continued to be surprised by all of the marvelous features that where revealed in refining a tree into a building; both in the level of craftsmanship and knowledge of woodworkers and arborists, and also of the tree itself.



The tree was then transported to the park site, where it became the suspended horizontal beam of this new structure, which is almost entirely made out of the tree itself. The tree’s bark was removed to prevent it from falling on bystanders, a process that occurs naturally as the moisture content in the wood drops, causing the tree to shrink and the bark to lose its grip. Craftsmen loosen entire cylinders of bark from the trunk that are then flattened and cut into a standard shingle length. The shingles was carefully stacked and placed under pressure to avoid curling. The stacks was then kiln dried to the proper moisture content, sterilized, and kept in climate-controlled storage until they where ready for use. Bark shingles are very durable, long lasting (up to 80 years), and maintenance free.

After debarking, pieces of wood are extracted from the suspended tree and used for each of the components of the concession stand; structural support of the construction, pillars and studs for the kiosk, swings under the tree for kids, chairs and tables to be placed under the tree’s crown, from which special fixtures made out of bark pieces will hang. Many school children visit 100 Acres, and we had those kids in mind when we decided to hang swings from the tree. On a smaller scale, we explored ways to use other parts of the tree in the concession stand, including pressed leaves and flowers that were taken from the tree and that became ornaments in the front glass of the kiosk.
We also made Yellow Poplar syrup that was extracted from the bark of the tree and that will be sold in the kiosk, thus meaning that you could actually eat a part of the building.



Exterior view


Swings made by pieces of the trunk


The VD-team handing out ice cream at the opening party


The top part of the tree with tables and chairs


Chop Stick on a summer afternoon


Chop Stick branded cowboy style


From inside the kiosk


Chop Stick at night time with the lamp shades from the bark of the smaller limbs

The delicate balance act of the risk of weakening the hovering tree with taking cuts from it versus having to have a certain amount of wood to stabilize and construct the kiosk and carrying the load from the tree itself was very challenging.
Many days was spent with the structural engineer trying different types of cuts in a computer model to optimize the structure. To be able to fit all pieces that needed to be taken from the tree into the actual cuts we needed to make drawings for every single piece taken from the tree. We also needed to optimize the kiosk both in size and in its constructions since it would take a lot of weight from the hovering trunk. The kiosk got a truss frame construction with two larger pieces of wood that are right under the tree. Using the schematics from our engineers force diagram program, we concluded that the wall closer to the end of the tree was taking more load, thus we sized up the two larger pieces of wood in that specific wall. All these alterations really just made the project more beautiful since the design became more refined in terms of more balanced proportions.


Master diagram showing the concept and the process


Facades


Diagram showing the cuts and where the different pieces of wood is used

The cut down of the tree and the transportation to the IMA
Image courtesy: Donna Sink
Here is a movie and series of pictures when the tree was taken down gently from a forest outside of Anderson, Indiana and taken to the 100 Acres at The Indianapolis Museum of Arts.

http://www.artbabble.org/video/ima/making-chop-stick


The transportation to the museum

 
The tree gets lifted with crane

The Creature Code

Visiondivision was invited by the Japan Design Association and Designboom to produce a piece of architecture as a tribute to the eccentric 18th century painter Ito Jakuchu to be exhibited at the Tokyo Designers Week. The team could also realize one of the projects in Tokyo with support by The Swedish Arts Grants Committeé

In the beginning, the world was untainted nature; creatures could find water in the rivers and the lakes and find shelter in the woods, the grass and within the earth itself.
With the evolution and progress of mankind however, nature has been shifted more to suit the needs of humans and more and more of the surface of the planet has become artificial with vast areas of croplands and the rise and prosperity of towns, cities and metropolises. The animals have been pushed away to smaller parcels of lands and whole habitats have been changed with the speed of human development.
Some animals have adapted to these new artificial environments but there are seldom any efforts from the humans to make it easier for them to do so, we don’t want them in our cities unless they are well-behaved pets.

Ito Jakuchu understood the value of animals and wanted to combine the worlds of animals and man into something greater.
In his spirit, we have done a series of projects to increase the awareness of that we are not the only species on this earth as well as in the cities that we have produced.

Common building materials could be slightly adjusted to still keep its intended function but that now also can be used better by the critters in the city.
Hopefully this could be a start to a design strategy for the urban animals.
Each project uses an advantage that the city brings and that could benefit the animal; Water, Food, Shelter, Heat, Production, Heat and Lifestyle

We realized one of these proposals in Tokyo which takes use of the water in the city.
The idea is that where we before just saw a gutter, we will now try to see small rivers, so instead of directing water from our roofs directly underground in a hurry, we’re proposing it to take detours that will benefit the city animals better which sometimes have trouble to find water.
To show a very literal example of this, we have made a gutter module that is a fish tank that fits any standard Japanese gutter.

We went to the Tokyo Glass Art Institute where we gave the instructions for the creation of the fish tank and which we later on attached to a drainage pipe at a residential house in the outskirts of Tokyo.
The result can be seen below as well as in the video where you also will see more of how the production went.









Water



Shelter
When we build our houses, we often make them impenetrable and hermetic to keep weather and animals away. It is poignant to see all this building mass and facades that doesn’t givie anything back to nature.
With simple modifications we could for example make a new brick into a bird house and another brick as a bird bath and so on.



Production
We have a superior technology and production capacity that we are alone of having on this planet. The combination with the size of a human compared to insects for example, means that we could without much of an effort give them entire cities in a matter of no time. If we take the Japanese rhino beetle for example, that live most of its life under ground, is having a hard time to find places to exist due to the immense foot print that our cities are making, and where there are not houses, there is impenetrable
asphalt and concrete that makes a coating over the earth.
We could easily modify drainage sheets that are normally dug down around houses into massive underground housing complex for the insects that would still function as we want it to but benefit them greatly.



Food
The waste of food that we produce each year is discomforting, if each household had a special home appliance under the sink where leftovers can be put and that also could be visited by critters like rats, cockroaches and worms, a part of this waste could come in use.
The small animals are also important for larger urban animals that prey on these for their survival.



Heat
Many animals hibernate in climates with cold winters and even if they don’t sleep through winter they anyway tend to be less active and slumber a lot and seek warm places. The heat that we produce could come in handy for some of these animals and can
easily be better shared to our fellow critters.
We could also give away some indoor space that we don’t use, like the area under a sofa or a bed for example.
This space could with a small enclosure be made into an animal winter habitat which is reached from the outside with a cover.
These can be already custom made with an enclosed space that is docked in to the wall opening, or be a small container that can be inserted in the same fashion.



Lifestyle
There are many intelligent animals that don’t just think of life as surviving and reproducing, the snow monkeys in Japan for example that both take pleasure in bathing and sunbathing.
We replace some of the plain metal sheets on the roof with curved sheets that make excellent sun chairs to stretch out on, just next to a curved steel section that makes up a basin of water that could be heated during the winter.
The chimney is also refined into a habitat for the monkeys so they can take part of the heat.
Monkeys can also use tools, so a set up with electrical appliances, connected with a sun cell unit, that can benefit the monkeys enjoyment in life, for example a blender to mix their fruits, a refrigerator for cold drinks, a fan for hot summer
days and so on.

Many thanks to the Tokyo Glass Institute and the glass master Kenichiro Omoto for his skillfull work as well as the other teachers and the students that helped.