Joining the likes of Renzo Piano, Antonio Citterio, and Arquitectonica, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) is the latest bold-face name tapped to design a luxury condo development along a compact, fast-evolving stretch of Collins Avenue just north of the Miami Beach city line within the town of Surfside. Referred to by Cultured magazine in 2018 as a “hub for Miami’s new wave of starchitects,” once-sleepy Surfside is more associated, however, with tragic structural failure than it is with famed international designers.
On June 24, 2021, a 40-year-old condo tower at 8777 Collins Avenue partially collapsed, killing 98 people in what was one of the deadliest non-deliberate building collapses in U.S. history. The ZHA-designed project—an “ultra-luxury boutique oceanfront condominium” —would be realized at the same site where Champlain Towers South fell two years ago this Saturday. (Federal investigators with the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently announced a preliminary finding that the 12-story tower, designed by William Friedman, did not meet building code when completed in 1981; an exact cause of the collapse has not yet been determined.)
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