Promise of Paradise

Promise of Paradise: staging the Midcentury Miami

Miami Beach, Florida | 2008

Miami is most authentic when it is most artificial.

It is a city in which each building lot has been created and molded. It is a city to which generations of Americans have been lured to perform in a spectacle of glamorous leisure, a spectacle that requires a large supporting, backstage and off-stage labor force to conceive it, serve it, build it and maintain it. More than most cities, everything in Miami is intentional, the result of human intention, intervention, and design.

Promises of Paradise examined an important era in the city’s ongoing transformation—the two decades after World War II during which greater Miami changed from a marginal resort city to an important regional center, an airline hub for the Americas, and “the sun and fun capital of the world.” It documents an era when the city was, at once, trying to shed its roots and a developers’ promotion and create the civic institutions and places of a serious city, even as it was promoted more energetically than it had ever been before, and a large part of the labor force was occupied with making more Miami.