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Miami Modem(MiMo)comprises a generation of Miami architecture spanning the epoch
between the end of World War II and the end of the Viet Nam War in the 1970s.Miami grew
exponentially during those years.and produced a varied architectural legacy that covered all
parts of its metropolitan arca.Resort activity expanded rapidly northward,engulfing almost
all the oceanfront in Northeast Dade County.Here,new hotel and apartment districts arose.
designed by such architects as Roy France,Morris Lapidus.Norman Giller,Robert Swartburg,
Albert Anis.Gilbert Fein and Melvin Grossman.Miami expanded West and Southward.
creating vast new suburbs and a new architectural culture adapted to the car.Within these
suburbs,the tropical home experiments of architects like Robert Law Weed.Igor Polevitzky,
Alfred Browning Parker.Rufus Nims,Marion Manley and Robert Little redefined domestic
life in the tropics.Miami International Airport developed from a small airfield into a port of
world reach.The development of the University of Miami campus by Weed,Manley and Little,
was followed by new campuses for Florida International University and Miami-Dade Com-
munity College.Industrial parks sprang up as Miami moved from a seasonal resort into a
dynamic year round city with a diversified economy.
Following the decorative impulses of the prewar period.Miami Modern generally aimed to
appear austere and highly rational.It enlisted the technical innovations of the day,like pre-cast
concrete,curtain wall building skins and jalousie windows.Its functional attitude and clean
lines,however,were often married with lyrical,hopeful,and often outlandish forms that un-
abashedly warped the functionalist dogma of the era.These flights of fancy mirrored dreams
of modernity that had special resonance in Florida during the postwar period.As the world
entered the atomic era,Florida boasted the Space Center at Capc Canaveral.the Sunshine State
Parkway and growing cities on an almost virgin landscape between limitless sky and broad
waters. Architects parodied the airplane wings of the jet age,the parabaloid arch of St.Louis,
the stone walls and the cantilevers of Falling Water.They also enhanced their buildings with
emblematic features of tropical architecture,like bris Soleil,screen block dividers and broad
overhanging roofs.A mix of modem and traditional elements indicated that MiMo was both a
reflection and a critique of purist modem ideals.Perhaps it achieved a'Post Modem'quality.
years before that term became fashionable.
Miami Modern comes into focus more than 50 years after its inception as its monuments
and its neighborhoods.its academic buildings and its industrial parks,its motels and condo-
miniums are explored with renewed interest.As is the case with Miami's Tropical Art Deco,a
contemporary term that subsumes the eclectic movements of the 1920s and 30s.it embraces a
diverse legacy of often competing ideals.In the continuum of Miami's development,MiMo
relays the pioneering European modernism of before the war into equally eclectic experiments
of a purely American architecture.As a new term,MiMo begins to fill the void of our under-
standing of the postwar period.which may now be examined as fostering a regional architecture
adapted to the peculiar environment of the tropics.
—Allan T.Shulman.Architect
Miami,Florida.September 2001