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what I was looking for. A whole abandoned district really, with land almost like countryside lying fallow on the horizon. The neighborhood—or what remained of one—was called Puerto Madero and it had once, in its heyday, been a vital oceanic shipping port. From the perspective of today, it seems nearly impossible that so much prime land on the south side of Buenos Aires could be left a vacant wasteland, but that is precisely what the area across the Río de la Plata had been. On my trips back to Buenos Aires, thanks to my friend Pato, who first pointed me in its direction, I began to stare out at Puerto Madero. I studied it for hours from a distance. It was a strip of land bounded by two bodies of water, the ribbon of the river la Plata and the enormous Atlantic Ocean. In particular, I saw this building that was asleep and I was struck by this deserted redbrick structure that managed to remain standing after all the decades of turmoil. The El Porteño had been an old grain-storage facility, a massive silo, built in 1902 and abandoned in the 1940s. In fact, it once helped save the world from starvation; it was the storehouse for the country’s grain during World War II, and from this spot the grain was shipped to desperate capitals around the globe. A pipe once projected from the silo and hovered above the river to fill container ships on their way to Europe. The connection of a grain-storage warehouse in the center of Buenos Aires to my grain-storage– inspired house in Punta del Este was not lost on me. Moreover, El Porteño’s majestic red bricks, I learned, had been imported all the way from Manchester, England, because of their quality and durability. But now the building was an empty vessel standing mournfully in a dead zone of the city, given up as a lost cause and growing nothing but weeds. There weren’t even roads there, just a series of gutted factory buildings and urban refuse. The very first day I laid eyes on the building across the water, it felt like destiny, not mere chance. It was a sort of Machu Picchu a short walk from busy downtown Buenos Aires. It felt magical, powerful, like a calling. I began to watch this site, spending a large amount of time examining it from across the Rio de la Plata, almost the way a scientist studies an animal or an artist studies a landscape. That same spark from the engine in my mind
It was Philippe Starck, in his brilliance, that came up with the idea of moving away from the usual impersonal, over-busy hotel lobby and to instead create an intimate portal. We called it La Catedral.
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“”
F
aena Miami Beach is a place of art, of music, of theater, of dance and romance, of food and wine, of lovers’ kisses and children’s laughter, of purpose, of poetry, of quiet moonlit nights and sensual speakeasies, of endless skies and oceans and dreams, of warm winds and deep sleeps, a place to renew the body and detox the soul, a place set amidst gardens tumbling and secret, in cathedrals of stone and towers of glass, with architecture both classic and modern. Faena Miami Beach is a place like no other.
—BAZ LUHRMANN
The Saxony as it is today—reborn as the Faena Hotel. The façade of the building was historically protected, but even if it hadn’t been, I would never have touched it.
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which Philippe first proposed, because it refuted the typical hotel-lobby experience of tourists and luggage collected every corner. I wanted the sense of reflection and spiritual connection, almost like a decompression chamber between the outer world and this utopia. It was Catherine who came up with the idea for covering the Cathedral walls with murals; she’d been inspired by the Art Deco Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris that is the home of the Museum of the History of Immigration. I liked that connection of the immigrant coming to a safe, welcoming refuge. Miami is also a town of immigrants. These murals had to tell my story in symbols and signs; they had to have a weight and meaning to them as well as a joy and positivity. I knew the perfect artist to commission for this project. I’d met the artist Juan Gatti a few years earlier, when I went to see a show of his work in Buenos Aires. I was so impressed by his gift of fantasy and wit that I bought several pieces on the spot. Juan lives much of the year in Madrid—he previously worked for Italian Vogue and on a number of Pedro Almodovar films—but I still think of him as a true Argentinian artist. I proposed to him to fill our Cathedral lobby with eight murals that would, through his whimsical, almost-cinematic expression, capture, as he says, “the history of Alan.” Of course these weren’t to be historical paintings. They were symbolic, evocative, conveying the spirit of transformation and creation. In order to conjure this journey, I created a series of personal symbols that follows the path of the warrior making matter out of emptiness, light out of darkness, of conquering insecurity and doubt and fighting for your dreams. These symbols would be incorporated in Juan’s vivid paintings. I’ve always believed in the power of symbols. In planning both of my districts, I’ve taken inspiration from castles and churches that come with their own wealth of totems and emblems. I’m not erecting mere buildings. I’m creating a neighborhood, a district—a new region, a new empire, a new community. A community requires its own iconography, which was the intention behind this set of symbols. In Puerto Madero, I had arrived before the roads were built, before a single tree was planted. Here in Miami’s MidBeach, I too was erecting a district from an abandoned hotel and empty lots.
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The Cathedral is a place of reflection. Juan Gatti’s eight hand-painted and gold-leafed canvases were commissioned to inspire with their mythical, spiritual, and religious iconography. These murals tell the story of my transformation and my life—and the journey on which we all travel.
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Juan often calls me “the New Medici” for my ongoing commitment to artists and their work. I believe that a living space needs art; a culture needs to give room to the works of its best creative minds. If we don’t interact artistically, we don’t evolve—we fail to grow and we die. For me art was a signal part of the district. It awakens a new consciousness and offers ways of seeing the world with fresh eyes. At the Art Center in Buenos Aires, I commissioned a number of public works—from the two murals by Pablo Siquier to streetlight sculptures by the art group Los Carpinteros. I was determined to do the same in Miami. The chandeliers in the Living Room and Veranda, for example, are created by the Italian maestro Alberto Garutti with bulbs that flicker every time lightning strikes in the Argentine Pampas lowlands. For the opening weekend, the Brazilian–New York art group assume vivid astro focus installed a kaleidoscopic roller-skating-rink platform right on the beach in the spirit of inventive play, an attribute of childlike joy and discovery that would be picked up later in Jeff Koons’s eighteen-foot-high Coloring Book sculpture installed in the front of the Faena House next door. Len was also responsible for the art that now stands in the space. He called me up one day to discuss two massive Damien Hirst sculptures he’d acquired. He thought they might be right for the hotel, only we didn’t know where to place them. Finally, I came up with the perfect spots. Beyond the spiral staircase of our Asian restaurant Pao is Hirst’s mighty golden unicorn—which is one of our Faena symbols, representing the power of imagination. It happens to create a visual rhyme with the unicorn heads along the walls of Bistro Sur in Buenos Aires, and it conveys the great power of myth. The second Hirst has become one of the landmarks of the hotel—and, by extension, of the neighborhood, as it can be seen from the boardwalk on the beach. The three-meter-high gold-gilded wooly mammoth skeleton in a steel-and-glass vitrine stands outside just beyond the glass lobby doors. The work links to Juan’s murals inspired by displays in a natural-history museum and to our ethos of evoking time outside of time and the evolution of the self. The exquisite bones of this long-extinct animal, Mammuthus primigenius, which were unearthed from the dirt, is a reminder of the lessons buried in the
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View of the pool and beach from the penthouse of the hotel. Looking out I can see the same horizon I look upon in Tierra Santa. The sun rises here.
OPPOSITE
Beyond the spiral staircase of our restaurant Pao is Damien Hirst’s mighty golden unicorn (Golden Myth, 2014), which is one of our Faena symbols, representing the power of imagination.
FOLLOWING SPREAD
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Alan Faena Alchemy & Creative Collaboration Architecture, Design, Art By Alan Faena Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. 300 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10010 www.rizzoliusa.com ISBN: 978-0-8478-6535-2 $60.00 US Hardcover, 9.5 x 12 inches 240 pages 200 color and b/w photographs Rights: World For serial rights, images to accompany your coverage, or any other publicity information about this title please contact: Pam Sommers, Executive Director of Publicity (212) 387-3465 psommers@rizzoliusa.com