SB Architects Takes Home ‘Best in Retail’ Award for Paradise Plaza
On November 21st, SB Architects joined 220 of Florida’s finest at Jungle Island in Miami for South Florida Business Journal’s, fourth annual Structures Awards. SB Architects took home the ‘Best in Retail’ Award for phase three of our multi-phase Miami Design District project, Paradise Plaza. The award, designed to honor the most impactful and standout projects in the area, was presented to Vice President of our Miami office, David Ser, and Associate Seema Sethi.
“We couldn’t be more thrilled to take home the award for ‘Best in Retail’ for Paradise Plaza, Miami Design District, which, like our seminal mixed-use project, Santana Row has made an indelible impression in shaping the future of retail. Through careful curation, collaboration and a multi-phase design and development approach, Miami Design District set the tone for a vibrant community and reinvigorated the entire neighborhood.”
David Ser, Vice President.
Celebrating 60 years in 2020, SB Architects has continuously applied new knowledge and re-interpreted evolving trends to redefine categories and break boundaries with our designs. We were originally approached to take on the project after our client, Craig Robins, CEO of Dacra, saw our design for Santana Row, an award-winning urban mixed-use project in Silicon Valley. Leveraging our mixed-use design approach and expertise in hospitality and district stewardship, we helped to transform a once-gritty neighborhood into an international luxury shopping destination unprecedented in the city of Miami.
In collaboration with Dacra, we created the architectural skeleton for the entirety of the 18-block, 2,699,095 square-foot Miami Design District, addressing building structure, overall identity, and the movement of people through newly created urban spaces as a multifaceted community experience. Without a traditional anchor, the project was designed with a sense of scale and a unique framework for the buildings. We worked side-by-side with a selection of fellow architects and designers to create the façade of each retail space per the specifications of each tenant, giving them the opportunity to express their brand’s identity through not only the interior design of their respective spaces but also by bringing their design to the face of their building.
Sustainably designed, Miami Design District is the first LEED Neighborhood Development Gold Certified project in Miami-Dade County and 33rd in the United States overall, with each buildings’ green roof providing a stunning aesthetic and thermal cooling.
We succeeded in ensuring the architecture and art of the project were harmoniously integrated and, in turn, supported the emergence of surrounding districts, reinvigorating the surrounding neighborhood as the cultural heartbeat of the city.