Virginia Key as a great civic space

On the road, in the buildings, and through the landscape, Virginia Key is a great civic space that has the potential to build community. 


But only if the community is not shut out.  

A  Virginia Key of great civic spaces is a place where public areas are protected - public shorelines among them.   It's still possible on an island that is publicly owned, filled with wild and open spaces,  and possessing an extraordinary public shoreline that is raw but beautiful in its simplicity.  

Virginia Key is also a place filled with  buildings of civic significance:  the historic Miami Marine Stadium, the Miami  Seaquarium, the science complex (University of Miami’s Rosensteil School and the various NOAA buildings), and the segregation-era buildings  of the Historic Virginia Key Beach. 

And there’s the road in -- the Rickenbacker Causeway -- designed as public parkway by landscape architect William Lyman Phillips in the 1940‘s. 

Restoring these civic buildings and spaces would go a long way to restoring a sense of place in a city that is apparently short of civic “centeredness” by design.  

“In this city, we don’t have a lot of public infrastructure,” architect Allan Shulman said Tuesday at a presentation on Miami Architecture, a new guidebook he co-authored with Randall Robinson, a landscape architect and James Donnelly, a historian. 

The book not only documents buildings of architectural significance but also places them in context.

Robinson, writing on the city’s history, describes how Miami sprouted into existence like a Wild West “gold rush” town, “with little regard for the creation of civic spaces.”

That can be remedied by making Virginia Key the new civic center, a place everyone feels they have a stake in protecting and preserving because it is kept in public hands, not parceled off to private development.

Photo: courtesy of University of Miami archives

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Ocean Study Buildings Part of Island's Architectural Heritage

The historically designated Miami Marine Stadium is not the only building of architectural interest on Virginia Key.

Miami Architecture, the new AIA guidebook, reveals the mysteries of institutional buildings than span 16 acres on both sides of the Rickenbacker Causeway.

The area includes the buildings that are part of the University of Miami Rosensteil School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) and NOAA (National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration.

“Taken together with the Seaquarium and Marine Stadium, it represents an impressive infrastructure of marine and aquatic facilities tied to the causeway system,” state the authors of the guide.

On the west side of the Rickenbacker Causeway is University of Miami’s RSMAS, with its focus on the study of oceans. On the east, NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Metereological Laboratory and National Marine Fisheries Service and Southeast Fisheries Science Center.

The oldest University of Miami RSMAS building is the 1952 Alexandrine duPont Collier Building, designed by Marion Manley.

Nearby is the 1966 Doherty Marine Science Center, designed by the firm of Ferendino Grafton Spillis Candela. The building was originally built for NOAA. The Miami Architecture guidebook highlights its most distinctive feature:

(I)ts waterfront facade includes the type of concrete egg-crate window wall the firm popularized in the 1960s, and is similar in spirit to the firm’s contemporary work for Miami -Dade College. Here, the egg crate is broken by a projecting concrete stair.

Along the causeway is the Science Administration building (Abramovitz/Kingland, architects), completed in 1985, and described in the guide as “vaguely nautical.”

Across the Causeway are the two NOAA buildings. Of particular interest to the guidebook authors is the laboratory building, with its detached office wings that lift high above the ground and “fine-grained grid of concrete window frames with deeply recessed glass.”

More on the architectural heritage of Virginia Key can be found in Miami Architecture (University of Florida Press).

UPDATE INFO ON PRESENTATION: The guidebook's authors Allan Shulman, Randall Robinson and Jeff Donnelly will discuss their new book "Miami Architecture: An AIA Guide Featuring Downtown, the Beaches, and Coconut Grove at this year's Miami Book Fair International, which takes place Nov. 14-21.

Photo: Virginia Key Signing. In 1948, the University of Miami signed a long-term lease with Dade County for land on Virginia Key to house the Marine Institute (now RSMAS). Seated second from right is County Commissioner Charles Crandon and to his left, President Ashe. Courtesy: University of Miami library.

@All Rights Reserved 2010

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