The City of Miami has for decades welcomed emigrants from all across Latin America who are searching for a better future. Capitalizing on opportunity, the largest foreign-born urban population in the world has over this time span contributed to making Miami a hemispheric leader in business, education, tourism and culture.

The Florida Current and Cuba’s proximity to Florida are both powerful reasons why Cubans constitute the largest group within the Hispanic population of Miami. The relationship to water of their diaspora, compared to that of many of the other ten groups commemorated, is particularly intimate.
The migratory treks of the other ten groups can be represented by vectors that originate at their respective country’s capital city and cross ocean waters to finally intersect in the City of Miami.

The new Pier Museum to commemorate this triumphant body of immigrants takes the form of a monumental portal over the sea – over the same ocean whose relentless currents ushered many to these very shores.  A horizontal monolith spanning 214 meters between the end of 5th Street and the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, it imposes itself over the casual seashore landscape of South Beach. A 60-meter-by-5-meter rectangular void carved out of it’s mass, in recognition of the seafaring Cuban diaspora, at once allows the project an intimate relationship with the water and transforms it visually into a new coastal portal to the city. 
Its welcoming mass becomes a perpetual open door celebrating both the accomplishment of arrival and the act of immigration’s inherent ideals of opportunity, endeavor, and progress.

The roofs of both the street level and underwater floors become a continuation of the public space of the beach. At left, an oversize picture window on the Sea Platform’s west wall allows views of both the ocean and the sea level public space from the museum’s Cafeteria (14).

The Sky Platform (3) offers views of the Miami skyline and features a path flanked on either side by Cuban Royal Palms, 21 in all, to represent the 21 countries of Latin America. Seven skylights provide natural light to the Entrance Gallery (5), Exhibition Rooms (11, 12, 13), and Library (10) below. Meanwhile, skylights on the Sea Platform (15) floor allow sunlight to refract through inches of seawater onto the Commemorative Spaces (17) below. At the end of Sky Platform path, a lookout point (4) just wide enough for one person juts out over the sea at the extreme end of the building. A solo space at the apex of a long walk, it recalls ideas of personal triumph, as both the ends and the means of human progress.