Gabi On The Go: Sun & Art Deco

I AM SO LUCKY!

The sun was out and this weekend was the 43rd annual Art Deco Weekend in South Miami, a 10 blocks street festival to celebrate the most preserved Art Deco neighbourhood in the world.

This year the festival's theme is "Sheroes: Women Who Made a Difference."

It's the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US constitution, which gave American women the right to vote.

The right place to start the visit is the Miami Design Preservation League information centre and gift shop. I joined their fantastic 90 minute walking tour and learned a lot about this period and all the efforts to keep South Miami the way it is today.

There were dozens of small street vendors, mostly local artists and food vendors.

Happy me.

SOUTH MIAMI ART DECO BUILDINGS

Most of the buildings were constructed in South Beach in the 30s, although the movement started world wide in the 20s.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco

Art Deco, sometimes referred to as Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture and design that first appeared in France just before World War I. Art Deco influenced the design of buildings, furniture, jewelry, fashion, cars, movie theatres, trains, ocean liners, and everyday objects such as radios and vacuum cleaners. It took its name, short for Arts Décoratifs, from the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes(International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) held in Paris in 1925. It combined modern styles with fine craftsmanship and rich materials. During its heyday, Art Deco represented luxury, glamour, exuberance, and faith in social and technological progress.

Art Deco was a pastiche of many different styles, sometimes contradictory, united by a desire to be modern. From its outset, Art Deco was influenced by the bold geometric forms of Cubism and the Vienna Secession; the bright colors of Fauvism and of the Ballets Russes; the updated craftsmanship of the furniture of the eras of Louis Philippe I and Louis XVI; and the exotic styles of China and Japan, India, Persia, ancient Egypt and Maya art. It featured rare and expensive materials, such as ebony and ivory, and exquisite craftsmanship. The Chrysler Building and other skyscrapers of New York built during the 1920s and 1930s are monuments of the Art Deco style.

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, Art Deco became more subdued. New materials arrived, including chrome plating, stainless steel, and plastic. A sleeker form of the style, called Streamline Moderne, appeared in the 1930s; it featured curving forms and smooth, polished surfaces. Art Deco is one of the first truly international styles, but its dominance ended with the beginning of World War II and the rise of the strictly functional and unadorned styles of modern architecture and the International Style of architecture that followed.

The Carlyle Hotel is one of the most famous Art Dec building in South Beach.

It appeared in movies like Scarface, Golden Girls and Miami Vice.

They all have the same characteristics:

- symmetry

- higher columns in the middle, resembling a ship or a light house

-horizontal and vertical lines

- "eyebrows" to shade the windows

- aluminium boxes with neon signs

Because it was a tough time, right after the big crash of 29, the constructions were inexpensive.

The sides of the buildings are pretty simple. Only the facade had details.

A very few of them are more than 4 stories high because elevators were very expensive at the time. So, the tallest hotels were built to attract the wealthiest of guests.

These tall ones were build to resemble the skyscrapers, popular symbol of development at the time.

These fonts of the Congress Hotel are the original ones.

This is a window grille from 1929, on display at the Wolfsonian museum in South Beach. It was originally from the Norris Theatre, in Morristown, Pennsylvania. This piece is an example of stylized decoration of North American theatres from 20s and 30s. It is a frozen fountain, an iconic design of Art Deco.

The hotels are not obligated to keep the historical style inside, but some do.

This is an original cast iron stair rail in the Essex House Hotel.

According to our tour guide, the country was going through a depression at the time but most of businesses of this area were supported by the mob.

These Terrazzo floors were cheap to make, to clean and easy to design mosaics. The arrows carried a hidden message, pointing to clandestine casinos in the property. Only those who knew what to look for, understood the code.

Colourful Terrazzo floors.

The light house look.

After the Second World War, this area lost most of it's glamour and the whole neighbourhood became housing for elderly people. This part of South Beach used to be called "God's waiting room."

Bigger hotels were being built in the north part of the island, attracting most of the tourists.

Until the 70s, when Barbara Baer Capitman started fighting the developers in order to preserve the local history. She was one of the founders of Miami Design Preservation League. The community is also celebrating the 100th anniversary of her birth this year.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Baer_Capitman

In 1976, Barbara Baer Capitman and a group of historic preservationists formed the Miami Design Preservation League. They began a fight to save the long-neglected art deco buildings in Miami Beach. She lobbied politicians and developers with her forceful personality, in flowing dresses and tennis shoes.

She and her supporters held candlelight vigils, protest marches and stood in front of bulldozers that were about to demolish buildings. Several of the buildings the group sought to preserve were torn down including the Senator and New Yorker Hotels. However, many more were saved.

The group's efforts were rewarded when Miami Beach's Art Deco District was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

The renewed interest in the area led to an economic and cultural rebirth in the city with new investments in hotels, apartments and restaurants. It became a favorite destination of tourists, artists and moviemakers. Capitman's son Andrew bought several art deco buildings in the area including the Cardozo Hotel on Ocean Drive. Artists, designers and writers were frequently found in the hotel's café.

Barbara's friend, Leonard Horowitz, was an architect and Art Deco lover as well.

He created in 1976 a palette of colours inspired in the sun, landscape, beach and ocean. Until today the buildings have to be painted with only these colours.

The Versace Mansion on Ocean Drive, where Gianni Versace used to live and was murdered.

It's the third most photographed private house in the US, behind the White House and Graceland.

The mansion, now a hotel and restaurant, is a classic example of Mediterranean Revival - a prior style to Art Deco - that wanted to recreate the Southern European architecture.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Revival_architecture

Mediterranean Revival is a design style introduced in the United States in the waning nineteenth century variously incorporating references from Spanish Renaissance, Spanish Colonial, Beaux-Arts, Italian Renaissance, Arabic Andalusian architecture, and Venetian Gothic architecture.

Peaking in popularity during the 1920s and 1930s, the movement drew heavily on the style of palaces and seaside villas and applied them to the rapidly expanding coastal resorts of Florida and California.

Structures are typically based on a rectangular floor plan, and feature massive, symmetrical primary façades. Stuccoed walls, red tiled roofs, windows in the shape of arches or circles, one or two stories, wood or wrought iron balconies with window grilles, and articulated door surrounds are characteristic. Keystones were occasionally employed. Ornamentation may be simple or dramatic. Lush gardens often appear.

The style was most commonly applied to hotels, apartment buildings, commercial structures, and residences. Architects August Geiger and Addison Mizner were foremost in Florida, while Bertram Goodhue, Sumner Spaulding, and Paul Williams were in California.

There are also examples of this architectural style in Cuba, such as the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, in Havana.

This building has no historic value because it was built much later, probably in the 70s. Although, because it is located in a preservation area, among other historic buildings, it was obligated to maintain the style. But never copy it.

OLD CARS PARADE

The Antique Automobile Club of America-South Florida Region put together this fun car show.

FROM ART DECO TO DIGITAL ART

Right in Miami Beach you can jump from the past to the future in few seconds. The Miami Artechouse is an interactive art gallery for digital art work.

FROM MIAMI.ARTECHOUSE.COM:

ARTECHOUSE is an American digital gallery and the first of a kind innovative art space dedicated to showcasing and producing experiential and technology-driven museum-quality pieces by artists who are forerunners of the new age in the arts and technology.

I saw the exhibition Infinite Space by digital artist Refik Anadol.

It's really hard to recreate the feeling only in photos. The constantly moving images are projected all over the rooms, synchronized by incredibly edited audio.

These are my legs, while I was laying down on the cool floor, enjoying the art and the air-conditioning.

FROM MIAMI.ARTECHOUSE.COM:

Refik Anadol (b.1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence. His body of work positions creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. In taking the data that flows around us as his primary material and the neural network of a computerized mind as his collaborator, Anadol paints with a thinking brush, offering us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and the body in motion. Anadol’s site-specific parametric data sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while offering a dramatic rethinking of the physical world, our relationship to time and space, and the creative potential of machines. Anadol is also a lecturer and researcher for UCLA's Department of Design Media Arts from which he obtained his Master of Fine Arts.

“This collection of work represents my passion to critically pursue the intersection of machine intelligence, media, and architecture. I hope to offer a new visualization of our digitized memories, expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and the body in motion, as well as a dramatic rethinking of the physical world, our relationship to time and space, and the creative potential of machines to enhance our cognitive capacities.”

It's just such a difficult concept for me to understand, since it's not an art piece you can feel and see in one dimension. It's a mind blowing concept while you are trying to consume all that data and make sense of the artistic manifestation.

A HIDDEN GEM

Tourists are allowed and encourage to visit the hotels inside, even if you are not a guest. I want to share with you a great tip from my Art Deco guide: visit the Betsy Hotel.

It's an fantastic building to begin with... plus it has a couple of amazing art galleries inside, and the corridors are filled with dozens of photographs of the Rolling Stones and The Beatles.

It is really cool.