Nearly 40 years ago, the young architects in a new, untested Miami firm got their first chance to prove their commercial mettle with a devilishly tricky commission: To design an apartment building on a Brickell lot so long and skinny it’s like a sliver of pie cut by a dessert lover on a diet.

The clever solution they devised — an elongated ziggurat with a red front and ship-like balconies which they named the Babylon Apartments — was so startling that it set a new bar for urban architectural pizzazz in Miami, promptly won a major prize and set the unknown Arquitectonica on a path to becoming a global design force.

Now the writing may be on the wall for the Babylon: The city of Miami and the building owner are working to have the landmark building erased.

A schematic version of the Babylon Apartments. The rear portion, to the right, was not built.
A schematic version of the Babylon Apartments. The rear portion, to the right, was not built. - Although the Babylon was designed in the late 1970s, when it won the vaunted national Progressive Architecture award, records indicate it was completed in 1982. Either way, it’s too recent to qualify for protection as a city historic or architectural landmark under the standard 50-year threshhold, though that can be waived for buildings of unusual merit. The Babylon was Arquitectonica’s first building and only its second design, after the famed Pink House designed for co-founder Laurinda Spear’s parents in Miami Shores. Spear was primarily responsible for the Babylon, whose name was inspired by its ziggurat shape — itself a response to the narrow site and the need to set the building back from adjoining houses that have long since vanished, some of the founding Arquitectonica members recall. Spear also did a set of romantically surreal pencil drawings of the building that drew wide attention among architects and designers. The Babylon also helped the young architects set the design template for a trio of subsequent larger Brickell condos credited with helping revive Miami’s image and propel its urban revival, including the Atlantis — the famous tower with a square hole and a palm tree in the middle that was featured in the opening titles of Miami Vice. Arquitectonica co-principal Bernardo Fort-Brescia, who is married to Spear, declined to comment on the Babylon’s fate. Spear and Fort-Brescia took the firm’s helm in the 1980s after the three other co-founders split off. Plater-Zyberk, who says she drew the construction documents for the Babylon, said she’s ambivalent about saving modern buildings because the criteria for doing so have not been fully developed. But her blunt-spoken husband, architect and planner Andres Duany, also an Arquitectonica co-founder and with Plater-Zyberk a founder of the influential New Urbanism movement, did not mince words. © Arquitectonica

The city administration has condemned the building, claiming it’s unsafe. In an unusual move, city planners are also backing a request for a substantial increase in zoning from owner Francisco “Paco” Martinez Celeiro that might allow him to replace the five-story Babylon with a 48-story tower.

The rationale for the upzoning cited by city planning director Francisco Garcia and Martinez’s attorney: That the existing zoning designation, which limits construction on the property to eight stories, is the result of a “scrivener’s error” during the drafting of the city’s Miami 21 code several years ago, and should have been capped at a much higher 48 stories.

But there’s a problem with that assertion. Both the city planning director at the time of the drafting, as well as the chief Miami 21 consultant — by chance, one of the founding Arquitectonica members who worked on the Babylon — emphatically say there was no error.

In fact, the consultant — architect and planner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk — said the Miami 21 zoning designation for the property, which sits at the northeastern edge of the semicircular Brickell Bay Drive, was “very carefully considered” to match the zoning capacity allowed by the old code they were replacing.

The planners say they were deliberately trying to preserve the Brickell Bay block’s existing density, which is less than that in the surrounding blocks of supertall Brickell towers, to avoid giving property owners a gift of extra development capacity over and above what they could build under the old code.

“It was not a mistake,” said the former planning director, Ana Gelabert-Sanchez, adding that she specifically recalls the discussion over that block because it was among the first in the city to be mapped under Miami 21. “It was not a scrivener’s error. We went through a lot of work to really calibrate capacity.”

Building owner Martinez, a longtime Miami real-estate investor who under the name George Martin starred in European “spaghetti western” movies in the 1960s, did not respond to two messages left at his office requesting an interview. His attorney, Vicky Garcia-Toledo, cancelled a scheduled interview on Friday, citing a legal emergency.

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