Richard Meier with a model of his Surf Club project via The Real Deal

If all goes according to plan, über architect Richard Meier’s foray into the boisterous Miami Beach development scene should bear fruit just in time for the bustle of Art Basel in the first week of December. That’s the targeted — and possibly optimistic — opening date for the revival of the massively expanded Surf Club, once a swank members-only emporium for drinking and sunning that is soon to be transformed into a Four Seasons hotel-and-luxury-condo complex, all three towers of it hovering over the beach.

In its previous incarnation, the Surf Club – designed by Russell Pancoast in 1930 in the style of a Mediterranean villa, with ornate ballrooms and beachfront cabanas – was a favorite spot for luminaries like Winston Churchill and Elizabeth Taylor. The core of the club is being preserved and renovated, and will feature the main entrance to the much larger complex now growing around it. The 80-room hotel will be at the complex’s center, flanked by two 12-story residential towers with 150 apartments and penthouses. The intent all along, Meier says, was to save as much of the original building as possible, given its beauty and historic significance........Continue Reading

> via therealdeal.com