Curbed Miami's Editor Sean McCaughan penned a review of the architecture of Miami's most excessive of period's docudramas, Magic City, which will be starting its second season on Starz Network this fall.
A fictional proxy of that most famous of Miami Beach hotels, the Fontainebleau, has a starring role in Magic City, a new period docudrama from Starz set in early postwar Miami Beach. The fake hotel in question is called the Miramar Playa, and was thought up by Mitch Glazer, the show's producer. Along with the rest of the show, it is a phantasmagoria of midcentury Miami architectural flamboyance, of woggles, cheese holes, zigzags, and bean poles (thin steel decorative poles that had a habit of jauntily going through things like tables and birdcages), inhabited by mobsters, Cuban refugees, and leggy models on beach blankets. But the more Magic City becomes distinctly Miamian, the more it becomes distinctly about architecture. Magic City is "International Style" glamour in a sticky bathing suit...[More] · Comment> The Lapidus Touch [The Architect's Newspaper]