The Concrete Line: Miami's Marine Passenger Terminals

In the 1960s, as cruise ship travel exploded and Miami emerged as the nation’s primary port of embarkation, the city developed an unusual ocean passenger terminal on a new island just east of downtown. The heroic docking station comprised almost 800m of terminal modules and airfoil-shaped covered gangways constructed of concrete, punctuated by telescoping steel walkways. Australian-born architect John Andrews designed the structures using a systems-based approach that re-invented the port terminal type, improving the functionality of ship to shore loading and unloading. He also synthesized the operations of the port into the theater of the city, taking full advantage of the port’s position straddling Miami and Miami Beach while considering the gleaming new cruise ships that were Miami’s newest attraction as part of the design. Historians have neglected Andrews, an important if cryptic figure in the development of modernism in the 1960s-70s (and of Brutalist architecture). A graduate of the University of Sidney, he attended Harvard GSD (grad. 1958) where he came under the influence of Jose Luis Sert. Andrews established his practice in Toronto and in 1965 launched his career with the design for Scarborough College of the University of Toronto. Scarborough’s powerful concrete modernism, contrived as a mega-structure, emerged from a logical approach to communication and programming that would henceforth define his approach to architecture. Only two years later, his firm was selected to design the Port of Miami terminals following a competition organized by the Philadelphia architect Romaldo Giurgola. Almost unique in Miami, Andrews’ port terminals elevated infrastructure to a significant public presence in the city. Based on the serial repetition of monumental forms, the rhythmic scheme emphasized the horizontality of both its program and its context. While not explicitly intended as a tropicalist type of architecture, the adaptation of Andrews’ own brand of Brutalist architecture to Miami’s hot and humid environment is notable. The amalgamation of open-air umbrella-type structures with hermetically sealed and air-conditioned compartments defined a regionally accepted environmental strategy, one found in other Brutalist work in the city (for example, the various campuses of Miami-Dade College, and many of the projects for Interama, Miami’s proposed Inter-American Worlds Fair, which were all contemporaries). As cruise ship sizes swelled, the port’s fixed concrete terminal modules reached functional obsolescence, a fate common to other, more prominent terminal projects of the same period. Yet the Miami structures remain substantially intact, adapted into the contemporary needs of the port, a strategy that may offer lessons in the re-use of similar projects internationally.