Inside the fair, entrepreneurs were selling architecture to go: Galerie Philippe Gravier of Paris displayed a pair of pavilions by Kengo Kuma, one with a lattice wood frame, the other made of polycarbonate sheets, suggesting a plastic igloo. Each is available in editions of five for upwards of $100,000. At the other end of the tent was a pavilion by New York’s Gluckman Tang (formerly Gluckman Mayner), a stylish lean-to meant to serve as a portable art gallery. Just beyond stood a very curvy picnic house by Zaha Hadid. The Filipino developer Robbie Antonio commissioned Gluckman, Hadid and more than a dozen other architects to design portable buildings, which he calls Revolution Pavilions. Antonio, working with the New York gallerist Edward Tyler Nahem, is offering them for as much as $450,000. Architecture has always been hard to sell as a service; Antonio and others are betting they will do better selling objets d’architecture.

Also in the bauble business in Miami: Fernando Romero, of New York and Mexico City’s FR-EE, was chosen by Swarovski, the crystal maker, to create this year’s Design Miami installation. His crystal-studded geodesic sphere is meant as a one-billionth-scale model of the sun, which he notes was important in Aztec and Incan cultures, as well as homage to Buckminster Fuller. But watching Romero pose for photos with Nadia Swarovski is a reminder that at design fairs, the work architects produce often has very little to do with architecture.

Of course there are plenty of new buildings under construction in Miami, including a science museum by Grimshaw Architects (which adjoins and partially blocks the Perez Miami Art Museum by Herzog and de Meuron) and the Faena Forum, OMA’s contribution to the $1 billion Faena hotel-and-condo complex. At the southern end of the beach, Rene Gonzalez has completed Glass, a handsome condo tower; at the northern end, Richard Meier’s Surf Club—a trio of blocks containing 150 very-high-end condos—is nearly ready for occupancy. The Surf Club developer, who says he is close to selling all the units (for more than $1 billion), let architects John Keenan and Terry Riley turn the Meier-designed sales office it into an art gallery — as a way to show off their new partnership with Joachim Pissaro integrating architecture and curation.

Over on the mainland, the Design District has become a showcase for work by up-and-coming architects, centered on Fujimoto’s blue-glass colonnade, a parking garage by IwamotoScott, and Aranda\Lasch’s pleated building for Tom Ford and others. But the brand name architects' involvement is only facade-deep. Increasingly, architects are having to forego the chance to do what architects do — working with clients to meet specific programmatic needs — in favor of making objects and surfaces that help promote their brands; let’s hope it's a winning strategy for them and the profession.