![]() In 1962, the City Commission hired the renown Chicago firm Ralph Burke Engineers & Architects to study the feasibility of and develop a master plan for a marine stadium on Virginia Key (4). The site became a major segment of a planned chain of parks, entertainment venues and public infrastructures that Dade County Parks Commissioner Charles Crandon envisioned and that was partially built between the Rickenbacker Causeway and Key Biscayne. The Marine Stadium (240 acres of land and water) was the culmination of a series of proposals for the development of the publicly owned barrier island of Virginia Key, situated north of Key Biscayne on the northeastern edge of the Rickenbacker Causeway. Registered in September 2009 on the World Monuments Fund Watch List, it has now been granted historic preservation status by the City of Miami but the integrity of its adjoining landscape remains under threat. Closed in 1992, the grandstand has been inaccessible to the public and threatened by demolition. Hilario Candela, a Cuban architect who worked with Max Borges in Havana (Tropicana Nightclub, 1951) and arrived in Miami in 1960 to join the firm of Pancoast-Ferendino-Grafton-Skeels-Burnham, designed the structure with the engineer Jack Meyer (from Norman Dignum Engineers). Used for motorboat racing and various types of concerts on a floating stage, the 6566-seat grandstand was built at the edge of a Circus-Maximus-like water stadium, designed and landscaped to face the stands. It is 33-meter wide with a cantilever of 20 meter over the stands one third of the structure is built on piers into the water. Less well known than its European and Latin American counterparts, but unique for its direct relation to a water stadium, the Marine Stadium Grandstand in Miami is a cast-in-place concrete 100-meter long building with an eight-section hyperbolic paraboloid roof (2). Many of the structures mentioned above were indeed characterized by long-span cantilevered roofs whose expression of internal forces cannot be dissociated from the athlete’s muscles in tension. ![]() Pier Luigi Nervi’s affirmation that every concrete structure constitutes “an organism within which all internal constraints are propagated and transmitted from a nervure to another” (1) is not without paralleling the overall structure of the human body. All these buildings were part of a heroic period in the development of a Latin/Mediterranean approach and plastic understanding of concrete, which contrasted with the rationalist canons of the International Style. Beginning in the 1930s in Southern Europe and spreading later in Latin America, a series of sport facilities were built in which the plastic and structural qualities of poured-in-place concrete were exploited to great visual and functional effect by architects like Pier Luigi Nervi (Florence Stadium, 1929-32 Palazzo dello Sport in Rome, 1958-59), Eduardo Torroja (Hippodrome of the Zarzuela, Madrid, 1932-33), or Carlos Raúl Villanueva (University Stadium, Caracas, 1949-52). ![]()
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