Miami Beach holds the largest concentration of Streamline Moderne architecture anywhere, and the buildings are peculiar things: hotels with rounded corners, stacked terraces, eyebrow canopies over every window, all of it put up quickly and in a spirit that was never entirely serious. Miami takes that stock and stacks it further.
The design layers colonnade upon colonnade with planting between, so the terraces rise up the wall in tiers and the vegetation grows through and over them. Perspective is deliberately overplayed, which produces the giddiness the design is after; buildings that were only three storeys high become something closer to a hanging garden. It is knowingly excessive, in the way the architecture it draws on was knowingly excessive.
The wide 0.69 m roll and the long 89.8 cm half-drop repeat let those tiers build properly, and the half drop keeps the colonnades from lining up into a grid. It needs height above all, and is at its best where there is enough wall to take in two or three tiers at once. A stair hall, a double-height room, a bar or a dining room will hold it; low ceilings will not. It is a design meant to be enjoyed rather than lived with quietly, and it should be treated accordingly.
