Commissioned by Related Group, Argentinian Fabian Burgos leaves his mark in Brickell with a rainbow stripped mural
Sometimes there is not a lot to say. Sometimes you just have to look at what a developer did with a part of a building most people rarely think about.
📍Brickell Heights | photo by Nadia Bouzid
The bands of color wrapping the lower levels of Brickell Heights and SLS Lux are the work of Argentine artist Fabián Burgos. Related Group commissioned Burgos to create monumental painted façades across the two developments, which face each other on South Miami Avenue. At Brickell Heights alone, the mural covers roughly 35,000 square feet. Across the street, the work continues at SLS Lux on an even larger scale.
What makes the commission particularly interesting is what sits behind much of that color: parking. Parking garages might be one of the less glamorous parts of a condominium, but they also offer an enormous amount of room to be creative. They take up several floors, run across large portions of a building's footprint and inevitably become part of what the building looks like from the street. In Miami, where parking podiums can occupy a substantial portion of a tower's base, that is a lot of façade to work with.
An exposed garage has its own visual language. Concrete slabs repeat floor after floor, with openings, shadows and glimpses of cars between them. Those openings can read as dark horizontal bands underneath an otherwise finished tower. Sometimes architects leave that structure visible. Other times they use screens, louvers, fins, perforated panels or other façade systems to filter what is behind them. Done well, these can be beautiful. They can give a parking structure depth, shadow and movement instead of pretending it is not there.
At Brickell Heights and SLS Lux, Related took another route. It looked at all that surface and gave it to an artist. Burgos works with intense color and geometry, using long horizontal bands interrupted by circles, blocks and changes in pattern. Enlarged to the scale of a building, those bands begin to work with the parking structure itself. The repetition is already there. Burgos simply gives it another reading.
That is what I find interesting about the relationship between art and real estate here. Related has been incorporating art into its developments for years, and Jorge Pérez's relationship with contemporary art is well documented. But there is a difference between placing an important work inside a building and finding a part of the building that can become the work.
📍SLS LUX | photo by Nadia Bouzid
Most of the places where developers spend money making a project beautiful are obvious. The lobby gets stone and art. The pool deck gets landscaping and furniture. The residences get better finishes. Everyone expects those spaces to receive attention. Parking is usually approached from the other direction. It is a practical requirement first, and then an architectural question of what to do with everything it puts on the façade.
That is why the Burgos commission is smarter than it first appears. Several floors of parking gave these buildings something they already owned and did not have to invent: an enormous canvas. The artist did not need a new wall or a special room. The project already had tens of thousands of square feet of surface because it needed somewhere to put the cars.
There is a useful idea in that for anyone developing, designing or building something. The parts dictated by necessity are not necessarily the parts with the least creative potential. A project is full of things that simply have to be there. Parking, structure, mechanical spaces, service areas and blank walls all come with their own constraints, but they also come with dimensions, repetition, materials and surfaces.
Sometimes the opportunity is not in adding another thing. It is in looking again at the thing you already have to build.
At Brickell Heights and SLS Lux, that happened to be the parking garage.
📍Brickell Heights | photo by Nadia Bouzid
📍Brickell Heights | photo by Nadia Bouzid
📍Brickell Heights | photo by Nadia Bouzid
Projects: Brickell Heights + SLS Lux
Location: Brickell, Miami
Developer: Related Group
Architecture: Arquitectonica
Artist: Fabián Burgos
Interior Design: Rockwell Group, Brickell Heights | Yabu Pushelberg, SLS Lux
Brickell Heights: Two residential towers, completed 2017
SLS Lux: Residential and hotel tower, completed 2018
Artwork: Site specific, hand painted exterior murals
Brickell Heights Mural: Approximately 35,000 square feet
SLS Lux Mural: Approximately 40,000 square feet
Medium: Paint on building façade
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