The Monad Terrace—a 59-unit Miami Beach luxury condominium—hasn’t been built yet, but its salesroom is up and running.
Set on the ground floor of an office building a few blocks from the Monad’s bayfront building site, the space re-creates the look and feel of a model apartment in hopes that its white marble bathroom, open-plan kitchen, and glassy bedroom might persuade buyers to spend from $1.7 million (for a 2,027-square-foot apartment) to $12 million (13,922 square feet) before the building is complete.
The Monad, designed by the French architecture firm Ateliers Jean Nouvel, has an on-site architect of record based in Miami Beach named Kobi Karp, who’s inside the salesroom on a sunny December afternoon to give tours. Instead, though, he’s talking about a squat, run-down bungalow across the street that survived 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 storm that hit southern Florida and inflicted an estimated $26.5 billion in damage.
“The structures that were built in 1929, 1939 had hurricane clips,” Karp explains. “They took the rebar that goes through the building and looped it through the cypress wood structure, so when the wind came to lift up the roof, it couldn’t.”
This is what Karp tries to tell people about real estate in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew: It’s not that developers shouldn’t build on Miami Beach. They should simply make better buildings.
If you go by its specifications, the Monad is just such a structure. By putting the parking garage on the ground level and lifting the Monad Terrace’s lobby 11.5 feet above sea level, its designers elevated the structure’s living spaces above some of the most dramatic storm surges to date (though surges are expected to rise), and by making the glass and metal supports strong enough to withstand a Category 5, they made it close to hurricane-proof, too. Finally, the building has pumps for the garage, so if it does flood, the water won’t stay there for long.
“Every progressive architect today looks at [climate change] as an opportunity to create a statement and a solution,” says Karp, taking a sip from a miniature bottle of Perrier.
What luxury buildings are doing now to reassure high-net-worth buyers, in other words, might very well become a necessity for everyone else in the near future.
The Monad Terrace isn’t alone—multiple buildings in Miami Beach, and South Florida in general, come with similarly elevated ground floors and pump systems. But as the co-creator of a building that came on the market just as Hurricane Irma brought to the world apocalyptic scenes of Floridians caravaning out of the state and reporters waist-deep in seawater, Karp is perhaps the most vocal of these stakeholders. After all, he needs to reassure potential buyers that their sizable investment will stay dry.
“Is flooding a problem?” he asks. “Yes. Are we going to have a solution for it? Yes.”