Urban Jam, Miami Museum Garage

The Museum Garage is located in the Miami Design District, a neighborhood dedicated to innovative art, design and architecture. Featuring the work of five designers, the seven-story mixed-use structure will feature ground-floor retail spaces and capacity for 800 vehicles. For the project, in 2015, Design District developer Craig Robins, commissioned architect and curator Terence Riley to develop the concept for Museum Garage. WORKac, J. Mayer H., Clavel Arquitectos, Nicolas Buffe were selected to create the garage’s facades, along with Riley’s own architectural firm K/R (Keenen/Riley), with TimHaahs serving as the architect-of-the-record.

Bringing together these designers from around the world, Riley drew inspiration from the surrealist parlor game, Exquisite Corpse. Cadavre Exquis, as the game is known in French, involved a collection of images assembled by various artists with no regard or knowledge of what the other artists have drawn, producing one image whose components don’t necessarily match but flow together as one playful composition. Under Riley’s direction, each participating architect was eventually assigned an area and depth to build out and given free reign to create fully individual designs. The result is a unique modern, architectural version of the Exquisite Corpse.

In the space between Nicolas Buffe’s facade and that of K/R, Spanish firm Clavel Arquitectos’s Urban Jam draws from the rebirth of urban life in the Miami Design District - where old structures and discarded spaces have been revived by architectural and urban designs. Urban Jam suggests a similar “repurposing” of very familiar elements, using 45 gravity-defying car bodies rendered in metallic gold and silver. In effect, the styles of years past gain a second life as lux sculptural objects, caught in a surreal vertical traffic jam.

Clavel Arquitectos: Manuel Clavel Rojo and Luis Clavel Sainz
Project Leader: Rafael de Giles González
Team: Ricardo Carcelén González, Ramón Gómez Ruiz, Adrián Riquelme Martínez, Mariano Tomás Fuster, Diego Victoria García, David Hernández Conesa

Partners: WORKac, Nicolas Buffe, K/R and J. MAYER. H.