1 · Position
Swire Properties, of Hong Kong — LHL-098 in this register — had already built Brickell Key, a private 44-acre island, before it began Brickell City Centre in 2012 on 8.46 acres of older commercial buildings and empty lots. Arquitectonica designed it; the firm had worked for Swire in China and Hong Kong. Phase one opened on 3 November 2016: a shopping centre of about half a million square feet, the residential towers Reach and Rise at 43 storeys and 390 units each, two mid-rise office buildings, two levels of underground parking, and EAST Miami — 352 rooms, eight suites and 89 residences, Swire Hotels’ first house in the United States.
2 · ⚑ The Climate Ribbon is the entry
A $30 million elevated trellis of steel, fabric and fritted glass spanning 150,000 square feet across the blocks. It shelters from rain, captures the sea breeze to move air and lower temperature, and collects rainwater for reuse — an environmental system disguised as a canopy. Its installation was the hardest part of the build. No other entry in this Part records a developer spending thirty million dollars on the air above a shopping street, and it is the clearest instance in the register of climate doing the work that air-conditioning does elsewhere.
3 · What Swire brought that Miami did not have
The development was designed from the outset around public transport, incorporating the Metromover station — in a city built on the car. Swire’s own description was of a place to live, work, play and stay with public space and parking below grade. Read against LHL-S-237 The Landmark and LHL-S-247 Taikoo Hui, this is the same firm exporting a Hong Kong pattern: a podium of retail under towers, tied to a rail station, with a hotel in the stack. The register holds three of them now and they are recognisably one idea.
4 · ⚑ The figures do not agree, and the entry carries them
Cost is given as $1.05 billion for phase one and as over $1 billion for the whole; area as 4.9 and 5.4 million square feet; retail as 496,000, 500,000 and 565,000 square feet; the ribbon as spanning three city blocks and four. Hotel rooms are given as 352 and, in one engineering account, 263. These are probably phases and definitions rather than errors, and the Library does not average them.
5 · Candour
⚑ In 2025 Simon Property Group bought out Swire’s interest in the open-air retail, taking full ownership of the shopping centre while Swire kept the residential and office. The developer that conceived the place no longer owns its centre. ⚑ Not established here: the terms of that sale, the second phase completed in 2018, and the wellness tower named in early plans.