Miami Beach, Water and Wind

Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group counts Monad Terrace by Jean Nouvel among its Miami work, and this cluster describes the conditions that shape any building on Miami Beach: water rising from below and wind arriving with storms. The entries are general accounts of the island and its rules.

Water comes first. The city sits on a barrier island about 7 miles long and 1 mile wide with an average elevation just over 4 feet, and NPR reported in 2016 that high tide flooding along its western edge had become routine, prompting the city to raise streets in neighborhoods such as Sunset Harbour.¹ The drainage behind that work was redesigned as well. The engineers at Wade Trim describe new pump station outfalls discharging into Biscayne Bay, collection pipes enlarged to shorten the time water sits on the streets after a storm, pump control panels lifted clear of expected flood water and road crowns raised.²

Wind is the second force. Florida swapped its patchwork of local codes for one code covering the whole state, in force from January 1, 2002 after two postponements, and one of its five volumes is given over to test protocols for the High Velocity Hurricane Zones, as a technical paper for IIBEC sets out.³

The cluster has three subject entries. Sunset Harbour and West Avenue follows the raised street projects neighborhood by neighborhood, the entry on rising seas covers the regional projections and what the city has done in response, and the High Velocity Hurricane Zone entry explains the code provisions. The building entry on Monad Terrace sits alongside them.