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A Miami upscale condominium carries classy details through to its car park
North Bay Village, Fla., is a handmade place from top to bottom. A three-island community created in Miami’s boom time of the 1940s, today North Bay Village is traversed by a major causeway across Biscayne Bay linking the manmade islands with Miami Beach on the Atlantic Ocean side of the Bay and mainland Miami. In the 1950s it became a popular hangout for such personalities as Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland.
More recently, Eloquence on the Bay, a tony 20-story waterfront condominium development, opened on the village’s Harbor Island (the other two islands are North Bay and Treasure—yes, that Treasure Island). Key to making the place stand out is a series of wave form awnings and fabric panels affixed to the condo’s five-story parking garage.
The architect for the project—Kobi Karp Architecture and Interior Design (KKAID), Miami, Fla., known for luxury hotels and condominiums in the south Florida area—found that these fabric elements softened an otherwise mundane concrete ramp attached to an elegant high-rise apartment building. Moreover, at night the awnings and fabric panels also prevent vehicle headlights in the car park from shining into dwellings across the street, ensuring a congenial relationship with the neighbors.
KKAID worked closely with Miami Awning to coordinate the project from design concept to installation, allowing the fabricator to measure the parking structure even before the condominiums were fitted out to help keep the project on track. The architect’s use of the wave motif on the car park façade directs the eye toward the entrance of the condo.
Twenty-six stretched fabric panels and 32 awnings were mounted on frames composed of steel sections. The frames were attached to channels mounted in the shop to speed installation on-site.
Miami Awning worked hard to standardize the number of radii in the architect’s original designs, reducing them to four to simplify construction and to control costs, as well as engineered everything to meet Florida’s stringent coastal building codes. The project opened on schedule and units have sold at a steady pace, despite a suppressed real estate market.