Bye-Bye Babylon

摘要

I first encountered Miami's 1980s architecture during a short visit to the city in 2018 when a colleague showed me the "ruin" of the Babylon. One of the first projects by Arquitectonica, a major Miami architecture firm, the Babylon (1978-1982) had been abandoned and left to a gradual but certain decay. After quite a controversy, it was slated to be demolished.This quaint apartment building made me instantly melancholic, yet intrigued. The Babylon was of a medium scale, quite unusual for contemporary Miami with its high-rise buildings and single-family suburbia. Yet there it was-Arquitectonica's first marker of a new era for both the Brickell area and Miami- standing cradle-like on its small, skewed site, overshadowed by stodgy white condominium towers.I wondered about the lack of appreciation for this poetic piece of architecture. What did this express about American culture and particularly the culture of Miami? Was this perhaps the perfect manifestation of Donald Trump's philosophy as laid out in his book Trump: The Art of the Deal which was also published in 1987 and in which Trump describes-without a trace of irony-how deal-making ordinarily requires a certain degree of intelligence, but to him was mostly about instincts.