Miami Marine Stadium by Hilario Candela

27/07/2016. Eduardo Torroja´s disciple [Miami] USA
metalocus, ÁLVARO LAMAS

Heineken and the National Trust for Historic Preservation are hosting a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the resurrection of a 1960s Miami stadium designed by Cuban architect Hilario Candela. Called "Save Your Seat", the Indiegogo campaign aims to raise money for the restoration of the Miami Marine Stadium – a 6,566-seat waterfront sports venue that has sat abandoned for more than two decades.

Speedboats racing in the basin, 1964. Image courtesy of World Monuments Fund.

Speedboats racing in the basin, 1964. Image courtesy of World Monuments Fund.

Boats are lowered into the basin in preparation for a race at the Miami Marine Stadium in the 1960s. Image courtesy of Friends of Miami Marine Stadium.

1975 Champion Spark Plug Regatta. Image courtesy of Friends of Miami Marine Stadium.

South elevation of the grandstand, 1964. Image courtesy of World Monuments Fund.

Commodore Ralph Munroe Marine Stadium, Miami, Florida, 1960s. Photography © Pancoast, Ferendino, Skeels, and Burnham. Courtesy of Hilario Candela.

Construction photos of Miami Marine Stadium. 1963. Photography © Pancoast, Ferendino, Skeels, and Burnham. [Courtesy of Hilario Candela]

Evening show, 1971. Image courtesy of Friends of Miami Marine Stadium.

A full house at the Miami Marine Stadium in 1969 during a performance. Image courtesy of Gus Schuettler/Miami Herald.

Miami Marine Stadium architect Hilario Candela in front of the stadium during construction. 1963. Photography © Pancoast, Ferendino, Skeels, and Burnham. Courtesy of Hilario Candela.

Construction photos of Miami Marine Stadium. 1963. Photography © Pancoast, Ferendino, Skeels, and Burnham. [Courtesy of Hilario Candela]

Pancoast, Ferendino, Skeels, and Burnham's as built plans of Miami Marine Stadium. 1963. [Courtesy of Hilario Candela].

Bacardi Office Building, project, Santiago de Cuba, Preliminary version: interior perspective 1957. Ink, wood veneer, marbelized paper and cut-out reproduction on illustration board, 30 x 40" (76.2 x 101.6 cm). Mies van der Rohe Archive, gift of the architect. Image © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Miami Marine Stadium by Hilario Candela. Photography © Rick Bravo.

Miami Marine Stadium by Hilario Candela. Photography © Michael Stephen McFarland.

Miami Marine Stadium by Hilario Candela. Photography © Rick Bravo.

North façade of the grandstand from across the basin, 2009. Image courtesy of World Monuments Fund.

Looking west towards the stadium and the city of Miami, 2009. Image courtesy of World Monuments Fund.

Detail of the stadium's support , 2010. Image courtesy of World Monuments Fund.

Graffiti that covers much of the reachable stadium surfaces, 2009. Image courtesy of World Monuments Fund.

The campaign is hosted by the American division of the beer company Heineken and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a privately funded US nonprofit group. Various proposals have been put forth over years, from razing the structure to resurrecting it. In 2009, the National Trust named the stadium one of America's most-endangered historic places, and the World Monuments Fund placed the building on its "watch list" of threatened sites around the world.

A group called Friends of Miami Marine Stadium have been working since 2008 to save the structure. In 2013, the city approved a plan to restore the building, and the city recently allocated $4 million to further the effort.

The campaign is part of Heineken's Cities initiative, which aims to help revitalise urban areas in the US. The company plans to launch additional Indiegogo campaigns for select projects later this year.

When architect Hilario Candela was tasked with designing a boat racing stadium on a small key just off the coast of Miami in 1962, there was one overarching requirement from the city: make it cheap. Really cheap. Miami’s Department of Public Works—an entity known for erecting practical infrastructure like highway overpasses—wasn’t interested in producing a great work of architecture. They wanted a 6,600-seat grandstand and they wanted it to cost less than $1 million (roughly $7.7 million today).

Candela, then a 27-year-old architect at the Miami firm of Pancoast, Ferendino, Skeels and Burnham, had other ideas.

“I thought we could create an outstanding piece of architecture,” he says. “It would be a sculptural piece.”

What he came up with was a singular athletic arena. Part of the grandstand would rest on land; part of it would float over the waters of a broad U-shaped basin dredged to accommodate boat races. The viewing stands would be sheltered by a soaring concrete canopy that resembled a crinkled piece of origami. And it would be an engineering marvel: The canopy would become the world’s longest span of cantilevered concrete.

Candela, who was born and raised in Cuba, studied architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where visiting critics included figures such as Spanish architect Eduardo Torroja, a pioneer in the design of concrete-shell buildings. Candela’s stadium in Miami was inspired, in part, by Torroja’s concrete grandstand for the Zarzuela Hippodrome in Madrid, with its cantilevered, undulating concrete canopy.

“People like Torroja were people who were searching for solutions,” says Candela. “But at the same time, they had a poetic approach to design. That made a tremendous impact on me.”

Candela also worked with other important architectural innovators early on. During college, he interned with Max Borges Jr. in Cuba. Borges was renowned in Latin American architectural circles for his design of the legendary Tropicana night club in Havana, a series of thin concrete arches linked by slivers of glass. Fresh out of college, Candela was employed at the largest architectural office in Cuba: Sáenz, Cancio, Martín, Álvarez y Gutiérrez (SACMAG). In the late 1950s, the firm served as construction architects on a building that Mies Van Der Rohe designed for the Bacardi rum company in Santiago de Cuba.

“We had the complete set of Mies’s drawings for Bacardi in the office,” recalls Candela. “That’s the kind of place it was. We would sit around having discussions about Mies Van Der Rohe’s drawings”.

The building was abandoned after suffering damage from Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The campaign is part of Heineken's Cities initiative, which aims to help revitalise urban areas in the US. The company plans to launch additional Indiegogo campaigns for select projects later this year.

Crowdfunding is increasingly being used to get public architecture projects off the ground. Plans for an underground park in New York City, a floating cycle route in London and a 400-metre-long pedestrian bridge in Rotterdam are among the projects that have received support through crowdfunding.