Volume 20 • Issue 2 • March/April 2006

Glass Makes Building a Landmark
A Florida project features the material in three distinct designs

South Florida has been a hotbed of dynamic design, and a prime example is Espirito Santo Plaza, a mixed-use development on a 2.3-acre parcel of land along Brickell Avenue in Miami. It’s already being referred to as one of the city’s new landmarks. 

The project, which includes a hotel, residences and offices, utilizes glass in a number of innovative and interesting ways. 

• It has a dynamic curtainwall that incorporates a unique design on the first two floors which allows it to have retail space at street level, unusual for the area where it is located.

• It has a dramatic 13-story atrium on the 25th floor that serves as a common area for residents and is a unitized curtainwall system suspended from a roof truss.

• It has a four-story, glass-sheathed area with a reflecting pool that serves as an entrance for people entering the building through the garage. 

So, depending on where you are in the structure, you see dramatic use of glass.

Starting at ground level in the front, the structure’s exterior enclosures were designed as “fish bowls” to keep water out in the event of hurricane and/or flood conditions. This was necessary to satisfy Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) requirements so that public lobbies and retail spaces could be located at the sidewalk level.

The glazed walls are designed to withstand the pressures of 6 feet of standing water—the FEMA requirement to allow occupation of spaces below the 12-foot flood level. In addition, the entire curtainwall enclosure has been designed to meet the stringent Miami/Dade County hurricane code requirements with their missile tests to help prevent damage due to the flying debris in hurricane-force winds.

Such is the building’s renown that it was one of the few new structures sited by name in the local press when reporting on hurricane damage from Wilma’s visit to the area last fall. That storm did cause severe damage, including many of the tallest buildings, but less than would have been experienced before the codes were put in place. 

Wall Typico

The intent of the architectural firm, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates PC, New York, was to design a structure of singular simplicity that balances the local fabric with its larger urban context.

The solution was a simple rectangle, a natural outcome of the urban grid. The rectangle is divided into two parts, front and rear. The front faces Brickell Avenue, the city face. The rear faces the Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. 

The city side has a concave face which results in an urban scaled parabolic arch through the intersection of two pure geometric forms, a cylinder and an incline plane. The concavity at ground plane encourages movement toward its entrance at the center of the arch, and also creates place along the linear continuity of Brickell Ave. The water side addresses the distant context with its lantern-like atrium on the top of the rear rectangular facing the ocean.

Most of the buildings occupants arrive by car, and the space between the tower and the garage, flanked by three-story podium wings, has been developed as a glass covered courtyard, with a glass bottomed reflecting pool in the center. It is one story above grade and on the office elevator lobby level. The space below, illuminated by daylight filtered through the reflecting pool, serves as a mid-block drop-off and entry for the hotel and residential lobbies.

While the so-named Water Court is the primary area where office users arrive, the symbolic space for those in the residential or hotel section is the 25th floor of the tower. This is the location of the 13-story atrium sky-lobby, fronting onto Biscayne Bay, that provides a spectacular perch over Miami. This large urban window becomes a lantern at the top of the building at night with its light visible through its glass walls.

External Cladding 

The sculpted nature of the building’s form is reinforced through the use of a homogenous glazed curtainwall for each of the building’s two orientations. 
As floor to floor height requirements differ by use (13 foot-4 inches for office and 10 feet for hotel/residential), the curtainwall was designed with a 3 foot-4 inch vertical module to allow common subdivision among floors, creating a uniform surface that could then be sculpted monolithically. 

Projecting horizontal painted aluminum fins lighten the green glass surface and catch the tower’s night lighting, emphasizing the tower’s dramatic form. 

Inside the Atrium

The 11-story residential/hotel atrium wall is a unitized system suspended from a roof truss above. Suspending the curtainwall eliminated the need for structural columns at the glazed wall, allowing visual continuity from the atrium’s interior sky lobby to the exterior balcony overlooking Biscayne Bay. Horizontal trusses, every two floors, brace the exterior surface against lateral and windloading. Wood louvers, hung from the underside of these trusses, create a sunshading system and give a sense of warmth and scale to the space. Scrim shades—similar in concept to those used in the theater—are also suspended from the trusses, helping to cut morning glare, and are dramatically uplit to create the nighttime lantern. 

Espirito Santo Plaza is an award winning structure that integrates glass intelligently into a design that allows the structure to take its place in the ever-evolving fabric of its city.

Architect's Guide to Glass & Metal
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