First Look At Starchitect Richard Meier’s Surf Club Addition

Curbed Miami

by Sean McCaughan

Amid a mounting brouhaha that continues between ‘active’ and ‘inactive’ members of Miami’s Surf Club over who gets a share of the sale money and who doesn’t, here’s the first look at starchitect Richard Meier’s (and Kobi Karp’s!) new designs for the club’s expansion, which will include an 80 room hotel, 150 oceanfront condo units, and 24 units on the other side of Collins Avenue.

The stark architectural contrast between old and new is as dramatic as are the stories revealed in the aforementioned squabbles over the club’s sale and the grand people involved. You’ve got Don Shula and wife Mary Anne Shula, banker Frank Smathers, the Whitman Family, the late Leona E. Whitman, and even James Deering Danielson, heir to the builders of both Vizcaya and the Charles Deering Estate in Cutler. A couple of prominent, but dead, horse breeders are involved, as is the Baron Walter Langer Von Langendorff, or rather the search for the Baron’s heirs. The Baron himself died in 1983.