Thanks to a unanimous vote by the City of Miami commission on twin several sided, LED lighted advertising towers -- the Arsht Center area is on its way to become the demon spawn of Tokyo (top) or Dotonburi (left)...except Miami's will be "mesh 'Art' murals" with ads, NOT signs with ads (avoiding lawsuits?).
Here is some news for the Commission: Light can be blight.
9 comments:
I'm not sure that posting images of two of the most vibrant central city areas in Japan really makes your case.
I may not understand it, but these areas tend to be very attractive for people. How much money is spent in the Times Square area daily? Compare that to the Omni area.
I think many people would chose a vibrant central city area over the desolation we have now, even if takes some big signs to get there.
If you want a lighted zany downtown, shouldn't you give it some thought as to where it should be? There was no thought given here. As I said, Lincoln Center is a subdued area, this is our Lincoln Center right now. They didn't put Lincoln Center in Times Square. There is a place for this nonsense, Maybe Park West where you have the clubs or closer to Bayside Marketplace, However....the Waterfront??? The Arsht Center area?? Does it make sense? Did we do a study? What was the driving force: Money not Planning.
lol, yeah, a copy of billboards are going to turn the area into Times Square.
And it's not just the billboards that are the problem. It's how the deal went through and how the city is NOT getting the maximum they could.
I used to think Sarnoff was on my side....
The two towers are the camel's nose under the tent.
500' tall LED billboards are only designed to make a profit for the speculator.
Now every developer who can write a campaign contribution will want billboards on his roof.
The trashing of Miami.
Posted on Sat, Jul. 24, 2010
Big changes with little thought
BY BETH DUNLOP
bdunlop@MiamiHerald.com
It's easy to be queasy about the proposed City Square garage with its two bigger-than-gigantic electronic billboards atop it. The project is planned to go next door to the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing arts. Even more puzzling than the garage's outlandish design is the rush by the Miami City Commission to approve a project that poses lots of questions and offers few solutions. One would think that legislation that will change the nature of the city (think Vegas on steroids) might be afforded some long consideration and some careful thought. But smoke and mirrors have always sold in South Florida. Show a few glitzy pictures, and you're in.
City Square comes from developer Mark Siffin, whose Maefield Holdings has a deal with the McClatchy Company, owner of this newspaper and the land it sits on, to buy the parking lots that sit between The Miami Herald building and Biscayne Boulevard. Siffin had already gotten approval for an even worse project for this site -- two towering condos and a stacked big-box store shopping complex, unaffectionately termed Wal-Mart on the Water. That this was just about the worst idea in the history of city planning is mitigated now by his current proposal for the land.
A 1,600-car garage would sit on the block bounded on the south by Northeast 14th Street and on the west by Biscayne Boulevard and the exquisite little Art Deco Mahi Shrine building, long known as the Boulevard Shops. The land in question sits in the shadow of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. There's no question that the long-fallow parking lots that lie between The Miami Herald and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts cry out for development. But good architecture and urbanism are all-important here.
Plunk down a parking garage, and it's a garage. Add in a few shops along the street and, depending, maybe you get, um, a few shops. Add in two gigantic -- no, bigger than gigantic, maybe humongous -- electronic billboards atop the garage and you get nothing much for the people back down on Planet Earth, also known as the sidewalk.
The best news is that Siffin proposes to restore the Boulevard Shops. The other good news is that in Phase Two of the City Square project he proposes to replace the horrid, misbegotten, city-ruining big-box complex with pedestrian-oriented retail and a movie theater (bring it on).
The bad news is the rest of Phase One, other than the Boulevard Shops, which will fill an entire prime Biscayne Boulevard-fronting city block with a parking garage, albeit one theoretically lined at street level with shops. The designs shown at the commission meeting and in the City Square promotional materials depict this garage as a truly banal building, more bad news.
But the worst news is the two LED electronic billboards, that might (or might not, depending on whose analysis one reads) spew out light greater than four full moons shining at once and might (or might not, again depending on the analyst) feature an ever-changing array of garish advertising.
What is certain is that these billboards will be big, so big that the images might not matter because there will be few vantage points from which one could take in a 250- or 350-foot-tall bathing suit model.
CONTINUED
BETH DUNLOP:
If you want to get a sense of the size of these signs, go outside and walk 350 steps, then look back to where you started (hint: it's approximately the size of a full city block -- the whole thing, end-to-end, side-to-side). That will be one of the billboards; the other will be only the size of about two-thirds of a city block -- still, as children would say, gi-normous.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed in any way to applications of new art or new technology. I can't wait for the video projections on Frank Gehry's New World Symphony building. Years ago, I made a plea that the Performing Arts Center be designed with new media and the 21st century in mind with projection walls and electronic signboards (instead we got a retread of a better-forgotten era in architecture). But I was thinking art, not commerce.
The signboards, of course, might not be legal. The city of Miami is attempting to ``opt out'' of Miami-Dade County's sign governance, which may or may not be legal and may or may not be possible, depending on who is doing the telling. Conflicting viewpoints abound: Will they light up the neighborhood and make it safe? Will they so obscure the night sky that the Big Dipper (much less a meteor shower) will never again be visible? Will they further disrupt the sonar paths of migrating birds whose trajectory continues to be altered by overzealous urbanization?
To make all this possible, the commission approved an amendment to the zoning code specifically aimed at making this project possible. Back in the day, that was called Spot Zoning, and it was illegal, but I guess Hard Times call for Desperate Measures, because the commissioners happily tossed aside their excellent new form-based zoning code and let Siffin's attorney, Jeffrey Bercow, provide them with a code amendment that specifically benefits his client and no one else.
And just as curiously, the commission approved this Phase One City Square garage without hearing from an architect or seeing detailed plans or understanding how it would work where it counts -- at street level, not 400 feet in the air. Scary.
At Thursday's commission meeting, union officials and others spoke of the jobs this project could bring. But realistically speaking, there won't be many in the short term -- the construction workers needed to build a garage and the handful of attendants to operate it. The sign boards will be fabricated off-site and lifted into place and, no doubt, operated by computer. No starving artists plying their talent painting billboards here.
It's Phase Two, which Siffin is supposed to launch within five years, that would provide jobs -- no instant panacea.
And Phase Two seems to be little more than some words and statistics -- ``upscale retail'' and a movie theater -- with no specific plan yet. One wonders why there isn't a plan in place before approvals begin.
We have a pretty steep public investment in that neighborhood -- in the hundreds of millions of dollars spent for the Arsht Center and designated for the Miami Art Museum and the Miami Museum of Science, not to mention the improvements to Biscayne Boulevard, the planned port tunnel, the changes and improvements to I-395 and much more. So how do we maximize this overwhelming expenditure and noble effort at place-making? Maybe the time has come to plan first and then act, rather than the other way around.
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Visual pollution.
The ugly 500 foot tall billboards proposed by alleged former drug dealer Mark Siffin and pushed by Tomas Regalado must be approved by Miami-Dade County and the State of Florida.
How could distracting traffic ever be beneficial to anyone except an advertiser?
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