Miami Condo Colossus Is Monument to Excess
Icon Brickell, a new condominium complex in downtown Miami, was intended to be Jorge Perez’s answer to the Time Warner Center, the massive mixed-use building developed in Manhattan by his longtime business associate, Stephen M. Ross.
Mr. Perez, the chairman of the Related Group (an affiliate of Mr. Ross’s New York-based Related Companies) and the undisputed condo king of South Florida, has peppered the waterfront with residential units in recent years, but he has never built anything on the scale of the $1.25 billion Icon Brickell.
At the point where the Miami River meets the Biscayne Bay, it has 1,646 condos, a 28,000-square-foot fitness area and a two-acre pool deck with a 12-foot-high limestone fireplace. The 22-foot-tall sculptured columns, 100 of them, marking the entryway were inspired by the monumental moai statues on Easter Island and cost $15 million.
But instead of representing a triumph for Mr. Perez, 59, Icon Brickell has become a symbol of the excesses of the building boom in downtown Miami. Since 2003, 83 towers with nearly 23,000 condo units have been added to the downtown skyline, from fancy Brickell Avenue through the more modest Biscayne Corridor, causing an oversupply of epic proportions in this city of 400,000 people.