Botanica Atlanta | Landscape Design, Construction & Maintenance

Images: West 8

In its May issue, Landscape Architecture Magazine ran a feature that alerted me to the freshly completed “Miami Beach SoundScape” by the landscape architecture and urban planning firm West 8. Based on the superficial similarities between this music-oriented public landscape and the Toronto Music Garden that I described strolling through last month, I had been hoping to write a comparison piece about the two. Upon entering this urban Floridian landscape, though, I found that they have little in common.

Image: West 8

 When I visited the SoundScape, I found myself in a carefully crafted landscape unlike any that I had experienced. Coming in at less than three acres, I found it difficult to determine whether I was meant to perceive this space as a tiny city park or a lushly planted plaza. Composed of gently sloping lawns, low seat walls, crisp-edged concrete walks, and densely planted trunks, the SoundScape was illuminated with a clean, white light. The designers wisely selected "Dark Sky Friendly" full cut-off fixtures. In other words, the artificial lighting points to the green spaces, sidewalks, and seating areas, but it does not unnecessarily pollute the night sky. On the muggy, steamy night that I visited Miami Beach, light pollution would have been quite distracting, but instead it was nonexistent.

Miami Beach SoundScape was developed in conjunction with the new Gehry Partners-designed home of the New World Symphony. From an architecture firm known for its bold, warping, and wildly shaped facades, I found this building to be surprisingly restrained. The exterior wall facing the SoundScape is largely rectilinear, though I could make out tumbling, white forms within the glass-screened box that makes up half of the length of this external wall.

Images: World Architecture News and Dezeen

 The other section of the Symphony building’s adjacent wall is a perfectly flat, white face. Depending on the night, an impressive arsenal of audio and video projection equipment may be playing mainstream movies or art films, or possibly even simulcasting a performance that is going on inside the building.

Images: West 8 and Sam Valentine

Images: West 8 and Sam Valentine

 One of the landscape’s most memorable structures is an assortment of vase-shaped pergolas that West 8 has arranged throughout the eastern edges of the site. These puffy, aluminum frames are said to be modeled after the cumulus clouds that regularly roll over Miami’s skies, and they are planted with colorful bougainvillea vines that will soon climb to cover the structures with dark green foliage and magenta blooms. The designers cleverly clustered these pergolas in such a way that they provide organic gateways from any possible angle of entry along Miami Beach’s busy Washington Avenue.

Images: West 8

 The greenspace of the SoundScape is dissected by an indecipherable web of paved pathways. This clean, white hardscape is given texture by a trapezoidal mesh of shadows that are cast by the pergolas. By creating an artistic interweaving of hardscape and landscape, every logical circulation path was provided for, but more than half of the site is still covered with vegetation. The result is a landscape that functions like a plaza but feels like a park.

It would be far from the truth to call the uniquely vibrant and exciting urban environment of Miami Beach a “desert.” But to a tourist or citizen walking beneath the city’s oppressive summer sun, this landscape may present itself as something of an oasis. Much in the way that they are depicted in the thirsty hallucinations of a cartoon desert wanderer, the SoundScape consists of a lush smattering of misaligned palm trees. Desert oases are valued for having something that cannot be obtained for miles around: water. In the same way, the Miami Beach SoundScape’s fusion of shaded greenspace, public art, classical music, and high-tech sound, projection, and lighting gives this landscape something truly unique and rare.

Image: West 8

By Sam Valentine, BLA, LEED AP