With flooding in the Miami metropolitan area already an urgent problem—so-called king tides rise from beneath the city through its porous limestone—along with the increased likelihood of extreme weather events due to the accelerating effects of climate change, the city is in desperate need of solutions. The Monad Terrace, a super-reinforced building that goes above and beyond current, city-mandated fortifications, might point to the future of climate resilience.

The Threats
“If the city of Miami Beach were, say, 10 feet high, 20 feet higher, we wouldn’t need pumps,” says Bruce Mowry, the city engineer, with more than a touch of wistfulness in his voice. “The water would just flow downhill.”

But because Miami Beach is basically at the same level as the ocean, “you have to create a gradient,” he explains. “The pumps do that.”

Miami Beach has about 30 pumps in operation, with another 40 planned. They’re currently used to handle water that mostly comes in from the ocean and sky, rather than water from underneath the ground.

“We don’t get as much water coming from the bottom as you might think,” Mowry says. “Right now we’re high enough that we don’t have the water shooting up through the ground in the city. But in 30 to 50 years, or whatever time it takes for the ocean to go up, water will become closer and closer to our surface, and our groundwater.”

Mowry has already changed building specifications and zoning regulations to insure that new houses are built higher, but when he started the job in 2013, zoning regulations actually prohibited builders from elevating their houses past a certain point for fear of ruining some neighborhoods’ residential aesthetic.

Occasionally, his perspective is coolly apocalyptic.

“That building’s not for the future,” Mowry says, nodding to a low-slung Macy’s across the street from his office. “I mean, it’s built flat on the ground.”

In a mini-tutorial that might send chills down the spine of the building’s insurance broker, he expands on the Macy’s vulnerabilities: “The water comes right up the door front, and it cannot easily be modified,” he continues. “At some time in the future that building’s going to basically have significant modifications to make it able to survive, or it’ll have to be replaced.”

Self-Preservation
While Karp, the architect, is laboring to sell a dream of climate-resilient fine living to out-of-towners, and Mowry is doing his best to make sure they have a city to come to at all, the rest of Miami is eager to preserve what it has. Eventually, its efforts might lead to a lot of buildings that look like the Monad Terrace.