The DFA-designed Wynwood Arcade, a retail and restaurant development by East End Capital, has been completed at 50 Northwest 24th Street with tenants expected to move in over the summer.
Its exterior features some vibrant murals by Tristan Eaton. The development will be headlined by tenants such as the Salty Donut, Bonobos, and a restaurant/cooking school by Norman Van Aken. Laith Sayigh, the founder of DFA, was kind enough to share some details on the design.
What made the Wynwood Arcade design unique for you?
DFA transformed three side-by-side warehouses into a single dynamic destination for dining and shopping. Studying existing site-circulation, we determined that the long blocks of Wynwood could be better connected using diagonal desire lines cutting through our site. We proposed a series of shaded, retail-activated streets organized by these existing desire lines. The four diagonal streets meet in the central trapezoidal atrium open to the sky. A grand public stair fills one side of the atrium, acting as a hangout and providing an organic way to discover the rooftop restaurant. A large canopied seagrape tree and three smaller trees in the atrium provide shade for seating at the stair.
How does Miami's vibrant culture inform your design aesthetic?
Of course, no building in Wynwood can ignore the enormous street art tradition of the neighborhood. At the Wynwood Arcades, rather than creating a neutral canvas for street art, DFA created an architecture in dialogue with art. The artist Tristan Eaton’s piece responded to DFA’s diagonal, playful facades with his own dynamic graphic intervention. Artist Agustina Woodgate is designing one of her hopscotch pieces in a loop through the Wynwood Arcades’ corridors.
How do your designs contribute to the Miami scene?
In creating a diagonal plan to be imposed upon the rectilinear industrial warehouses with their precast double T-profile roofs, DFA was willfully quixotic. A building that was previously simple, efficient and industrial is dissected in its renovation and becomes unpredictable and dynamic. This untraditional approach to adaptive re-use means the building as discovered from the street is unlike any other retail experience in Wynwood and perhaps all of Miami.
A full list of Wynwood Arcade tenants is below:
- The Salty Donut
- Bonobos
- Patrizia Bozzi Design
- In the Kitchen with Norman Van Aken (school/lounge to open in September, restaurant in October)
- Raphaella Booz
- OSME
- MuseØ
East End Capital also just announced plans for Wynwood 25, a mixed-use development with apartments in the heart of Wynwood.