How Miami got Viced

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There are pinks and then there are pinks. Millennial pink coloured the 2010s. Schiaparelli pink lit up the 1930s. Miami pink was the neon glow of the 1980s. The seeds of the latter were sown in art deco, but it was plugged in and electrified by Michael Mann, executive producer of Miami Vice, with a soundtrack of Jan Hammer synth and some relaxed, tonal Armani tailoring.

It couldn’t have flowered as extravagantly at any other time. When the first episodes of the show aired in 1984, many of the city’s waterfront hotels and apartment buildings that are now considered cherished masterpieces were beige and decaying. By the time of the last season finale in 1989, those structures formed part of what writer Joan Didion called a “rich and wicked pastel boomtown”. The transformation of the city in that interim period, and what led up to it, is as wild as any of the show’s plotlines. Here was a beach town, ignored for decades, enjoying an absurdity of sudden wealth from the cocaine trade that put the 19th-century gold rush in the shade. Austerity wasn’t an appropriate aesthetic.

We were all involved in the revolt against the beige and white

Numerous architects and product designers contributed to the new look of American architecture, including Michael Graves and Steven Holl, but it was Arquitectonica that ruled. Still a global force today, the practice founded by Laurinda Spear and Bernardo Fort-Brescia in 1977 was put on the map by the Miami house Spear worked on – initially with her then professor, Rem Koolhaas – as a home for her family. The result, with grids of glass blocks, a courtyard pool and squared-off planes in five different shades of the same colour, was the first formally acknowledged Arquitectonica project and became an icon. The property appeared repeatedly in Miami Vice, as well as in pop videos and fashion shoots by Bruce Weber. It was and remains The Pink House.

Alastair Gordon, author of the Rizzoli monograph on Arquitectonica, explains the building’s significance: “The pink soon ingrained itself into the very DNA of the city,” he says, “connoting an urban environment that was both exotic and decadent in its pinkness. The impression was further reinforced in 1983 when artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude created the Surrounded Islands installation for Biscayne Bay. Some of the Christo islands could be seen from the terrace of the Pink House: pink to pink.”

Bernardo Fort-Brescia attributes a lot of the fame of The Pink House, and their other buildings in the city – including the now demolished fire-engine-red Babylon apartment and the Atlantis condo building, with its blue grid façade and yellow-accented void – to the way they were presented in the TV show. “There was no internet,” he says. “It’s one thing to be on the cover of every architectural magazine, but that’s just read by other architects. When our buildings appeared in Miami Vice, it was the announcement of a new Miami to the world. You saw it on television, it connected the dots of the graphic power of the early buildings.”

The buildings of the new Miami were partly successors to deco, but more accurately they were developing some of the neo-baroque ideas explored by Morris Lapidus in the 1950s. Much of this work has been lumped together, erroneously, as postmodern. And it shouldn’t be. “Postmodern meant Robert AM Stern referencing classic architecture, and looking back,” says Fort-Brescia. “We were not doing broken neoclassical columns. It was a difficult time for us – being modernists in a period when postmodernism was so popular. We were actually the outsiders. We were fighting for abstraction.”

If the architecture of the period had more in common with Le Corbusier than Frank Gehry, the interiors were often a mix of Halston louche (steel tables by Maria Pergay are perfect for chopping lines) and the postmodernism against which Fort-Brescia was reacting. But there was no escaping the reality that they co-existed in the same universe. One of the simplest objects you might have found in one of those homes was the Easylight created by Philippe Starck in 1979 – a simple neon floor tube to lean against a wall. Starck would go on to be integral to the look of the new Miami when he refashioned the Delano Hotel in the mid-1990s, filling it with billowing fabrics and white-on-white elements that paid po-mo homage to Versailles. 

Then there was the 1970 Ultrafragola Mirror by Ettore Sottsass, with its wiggly neon frame, that fits perfectly with the Miami Vice aesthetic. The Jellyfish mirror launched by Bryan O’Sullivan recently, with its illuminated ruffle, has the same visual energy. “I’ve long been an admirer of the world of Arquitectonica,” says O’Sullivan’s husband and co-founder of the studio, James O’Neill. “Theirs is an interesting, distilled take on art deco. Designs are often restrained in form with an unexpected playful flourish and fabulous colour accent. We are currently working on an Auberge Hotel in South Beach and have drawn inspiration in our designs from this movement.” 

Deco or postmodern? Both? More? Things get complicated when you consider that Arquitectonica also contributed to the canon of Memphis furniture in Milan by designing the kidney-shaped Madonna table in 1984. It’s still available to order, for €15,430. “I guess we were grouped together with Memphis at the time,” says Fort-Brescia, “because we were all involved in the revolt against the beige and white of the era.” Gordon sums up the era in the introduction to his book: “It was European rationalism cross-fertilised with tropical surrealism.” 

Charlotte von Moos, author of Miami in the 1980s: The Vanishing Architecture of a “Paradise Lost”, points to the diverse influences that melded to forge the new Miami. She cites the muscular modernism of Le Corbusier (although not the 43 low-saturation shades of his swatch book in 1931) and Mexican architects Luis Barragán and Ricardo Legorreta. Both were as bold with their use of brights as Corb was restrained. And the influence of Latin American aesthetics can’t be overstated when it comes to the Miami new wave. Neither can the influence of Michael Mann himself, whose vision for the show and associated filmography was hyper-glossy. 

But there’s a darkness too. Miami is a dark city with a glossy patina. Before Miami Vice, Michael Mann directed the 1983 supernatural horror film The Keep, lit and art-directed in a way that might recall a high-end fragrance commercial. His fascination with interiors and architecture, light and reflection marketed Miami in a whole new way. There would be glass brick to illuminate internal spaces, tropical sunlight to make façades glow. Architecture, as much as cocaine, would define the city.

“Architecture with a capital ‘A’ became the primary ingredient in marketing high-end properties,” says Gordon. “Celebrity designers like Herzog & de Meuron, Sir Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas (OMA), Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, David Chipperfield and others parachuted into the city for a hopped-up media frenzy.” And frenzy is right. “I remember being at the opening of Zaha Hadid’s One Thousand Museum tower in 2019,” he recalls. “She was practically crushed to death by the adoring crowd. I was there to witness it. It was totally bizarre. Totally Miami.”