An architectural ideas competition is looking for proposals that explore the idea of floating affordable housing in Biscayne Bay, to address the dual issues of climate change and housing affordability in South Florida. The competition brief overlooks the many complications that would make something like this extremely difficult if not impossible to build, not the least of which is environmental concerns, but focusing on these main problems it hopes to find some innovative solutions.
Well, it's literally taking decades but Miami's bay walk is gradually becoming a reality. A brand new 300 foot section of the bay walk, passing behind the Miami Women's Club and connecting two other existing sections of walkway, opened this week, providing an important link in the chain.
The Scavenger 2000 looks like a small tugboat with arms, wings, or, heck, pinball machine flippers. It may not have the viral Facebook fame of Baltimore’s Mr. Trash Wheel, but the Scavenger 2000 is a more practical and effective vehicle. A Miami-based company called Water Management Technologies created the boat, which is designed to reduce water pollution as well as skim floating surface waste.
Miami’s bay walk, extending along the edge of Biscayne Bay from Edgewater to Brickell, through the heart of the city has been in the planning stages for decades. Yet, with plenty of false starts, this great civic amenity designed to ensure public access to the waterfront is still nowhere near completion. At times, the city's dream of a completely interconnected bay walk connecting and opening Miami’s urban core to the waterfront appears tantalizingly close to completion and, at others, completely dead in its tracks.
A retrospective exhibit of perhaps the single greatest piece of public art to be created in Miami, by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, is opening this week at PAMM.
