Palm Court, Miami Design District,
Miami, USA

To reinforce the identity by night the lighting approach was twofold: to provide a base backbone of integrated landscape lighting to tie the court together with functional lighting and to highlight the individual architectural, landscape and art interventions with an individual approach.
Executive Architect
SB Architects
Design Architect
Sou Fujimoto Architects
Design Landscape Architects
Island Planning Corporation
Electrical Engineers
HNGS
Builders
Coastal Construction
Photographer
Robin Hill
 
Project Team
Keith Bradshaw, Carrie Donahue Bremner, Dave Morris

Palm Court forms the southernmost edge of the district and is characterised by a central plaza around which retail developments have been arranged.

In keeping with the Masterplan, the lighting approach offers a cohesive backbone of integrated landscape lighting and required functional light, layered with individually designed highlights to the selected architectural interventions within the court.”

Palm Court, the first phase that was completed, forms the southernmost edge of the district. Located at the bottom of the Paseo, the court is characterised by a central plaza around which retail developments have been arranged.


Centrally within the court, the Buckminster Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome is internally uplit creating a positive interior above the handrail lit spiral stair ascending from the parking. The dome sits within a pool of water kept purposefully dark to act as a reflecting pool for the dome. The whole structure is haloed by low level lighting reinforcing the plinth.


High level parapet mounted luminaires provide practical light consistently along the open pedestrian routes reinforced by integrated lighting to escalators and handrails where possible.

The palm trees are softly uplit from a pattern of recessed luminaires set out compositionally in the landscape surface. To accentuate the palm leaves as a positive canopy by night, small LED projectors are mounted to the trees to saturate the leaves with a green light.


The glass building acts as the backdrop to the court with the blades of blue glass appearing as a waterfall of colour behind which the retail sits. The transparency and density of the blue glass made it difficult to light so the approach was to frit a percentage of the glass fins in order for them to transmit light across the surface. Narrow distribution luminaires skim light across along the frit layered blades so the facade appears to shimmer along its length.