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#PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE PROJECTS

Barozzi Veiga to design campus for mainstay Miami nonprofit Oolite Arts

Miami nonprofit Oolite Arts has hired Spanish firm Barozzi Veiga to design its new headquarters.

The 36-year-old group, formerly known as ArtCenter/South Florida, purchased a warehouse property in the city’s Little Haiti-Little River neighborhood, according to the Miami Herald, and plans to build a $30 million center boasting artists’ studios, a theater, a maker space, and classrooms for professionals and the public.

“Miami’s visual arts community has grown exponentially over the past decade, and Oolite Arts has transformed its programming to help Miami-based artists grow,” said Dennis School, president and CEO of Oolite Arts, in a press release. “Our new home will enable us to better meet the needs of both visual artists and the community.”

As the Miami Herald notes, Oolite Arts and its old headquarters on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road Mall once helped revive a once-forgotten strip of land into a thriving commercial and cultural corridor. The nonprofit’s upcoming new space will be located at 75 NW 72nd St. runs along the Florida East Coast Railway and is slated to open in 2022. At 35,000-square-feet, the campus is expected to also bolster the largely industrial area and its surrounding community, a neighborhood that’s been growing with incoming art galleries and arts-related organizations looking for cheaper rent.

News of Barozzi Veiga’s selection comes just months after the Barcelona-based studio was announced as the new campus master plan architects for the Art Institute of Chicago, an institution also located over a rail line. The firm’s most recently-completed structure, a museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, additionally dealt with train tracks.

Established in 2004 by Fabrizio Barozzi and Alberto Veiga, the international practice has won numerous awards for its cultural work including the Mies van der Rohe Award for European Architecture for its design of Poland’s Szczecin Philharmonic Hall in 2015. The duo has designed countless projects around the world and a few smaller commissions in the United States, but Oolite Arts will be Barozzi Veiga’s first building in the country.

Miami-based firm Charles Benson will serve as the architect of record on the arts center, and visuals will be released later this year.

Details

  • Miami, FL, USA
  • Barozzi Veiga