Show Partner

The Miami Design District is a creative neighborhood dedicated to innovative fashion, design, art, architecture and dining experiences. It is home to more than 170 flagship stores including Chanel, Hermes, Dior, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, and more, making it one of the world’s greatest shopping areas. The vision for a rejuvenated Design District – responsive to its historic, urban and tropical context – was codified into an urban master plan developed by award-winning master planners Duany Plater-Zyberk, with the additional participation of architects including Sou Fujimoto, Aranda/Lasch, Aranguren & Gallegos, K/R, Johnston Marklee. The Miami Design District is dedicated to creative collaborations and its public art and design program comprises works by Buckminster Fuller, Zaha Hadid, John Baldessari, Marc Newson, Konstantin Grcic, Xavier Veilhan, Urs Fisher and Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec and others. The Miami Design District's landscape masterplan by Island Planning Corporation comprises lush green spaces, rooftop gardens, an impressive Palm collection, and streets lined with indigenous canopy trees, offering shade and a lowered ambient climate. As Miami becomes increasingly known for its own rich culture, the growth of the Miami Design District further reflects how the city is deserving of its place on the global stage.

Design Miami/ Paris Featured Project

Miami Design District presents: EXPRESSION. SERVICE. ESSENCE.

by Samuel Ross

The essence of sculpture is to project and endow the spirit, with a sense of being, it is to radiate and project a plethora of human allegories, often bridging space, time and location - a matter that escapes vernacular and revitalizes the soul. The nature of service is to determine and solicit the needs of the populace. The viewer transitions from the actor to the protagonist when both disciplines coalesce. Intimate engagements with functional sculpture often take place as familiar gestures. Sitting, standing, leaning, lurching. Prompts and bodily acts of millennia within the public forums and the privacy of domestic and sacred dwellings. Each contact with the material is a composite of the senses alighting to sensory elation. Be it temperature, colour or surface. A sense of what we are, and what we are not. An affirmation of our connection to material, to location, to the inanimate and intangible qualities of the self. It is a rarity to engage with the rhythm of sculpture, and service through the remit public space, at a pace that projects the inflections of a globalized society. A society that is often connected through digital surfaces, rather than physical locations. Soliciting both matters is a mediation of modernity. It is to deeply understand the intimacy and cadence of a geographic fractal connection between the physical and the channel of thought we share. Design District is an aperture of sorts. A funnel into an optimistic projection of what public space has the capacity to become. A compounding of values, enabling expression, aesthetics and trade to coalesce. Simply put, the design district encapsulation of expression, service and essence.

The essence of sculpture is to project and endow the spirit, with a sense of being, it is to radiate and project a plethora of human allegories, often bridging space, time and location - a matter that escapes vernacular and revitalizes the soul.

Dr. Samuel Ross on the importance of public space