Miami photographs in two completely different registers. There is the low rise pastel of South Beach, all curved corners and neon trim along Ocean Drive, and there is the dense glass of Brickell and downtown across the water. They look like different cities because, in terms of when and why they were built, they effectively are.
The Deco district, and a correction
The Miami Beach Architectural District covers a remarkable concentration of buildings from roughly the 1930s, mostly small hotels and apartment blocks in a streamlined style with rounded corners, horizontal banding, porthole windows and vertical fin signage.
The popular belief is that these buildings have always been pink, mint and turquoise. They have not. The original palette was substantially more restrained, dominated by white and cream with modest trim colours.
The pastel scheme most people picture dates from a preservation campaign that began in the 1970s, when the district was run down and under threat of demolition. As part of the revival, designer Leonard Horowitz developed a bolder colour palette and applied it across many of the buildings. It was a deliberate intervention, and it is a significant reason the district became famous rather than lost.
The look that defines Miami Beach in the public imagination is roughly fifty years old, applied to buildings roughly ninety years old, and it saved them.
Why pastel works in that specific light
Subtropical light near the water is intense and comes from several directions at once: direct sun, sky, and a substantial amount bounced up off pale sand and water.
Saturated dark colours in that environment absorb heat and read as heavy. Pale colours with a hint of chroma do something more useful. They stay bright without glaring, they pick up the colour of whatever is bouncing onto them, and at the end of the day they take on the warmth of low sun without losing their identity.
This is why South Beach photographs change character so completely between noon and dusk. At midday the pastels are washed out and the scene is about shape. At dusk they saturate, the neon comes up, and the scene is about colour.
The other Miami
Across Biscayne Bay the story is entirely different. Brickell and downtown are dense, vertical and almost entirely glass, built in waves from the 1980s onward with a very large surge through the 2000s and 2010s.
That skyline is best photographed from across the water, where the bay provides a reflective foreground and the towers stack into a band. Because so much of it is recent construction with similar curtain wall systems, it reads as a unified mass rather than as individual landmarks, which makes it a good subject for wide compositions and a poor one for picking out detail.
Many towers carry programmable architectural lighting, so night images of Brickell can be unexpectedly colourful in ways that have nothing to do with the daytime palette.
Weather is the variable
Florida skies rarely cooperate on schedule, and that is usually an advantage. Afternoon convection builds large cumulus and thunderheads through much of the year, which gives the sky structure instead of a flat blue field.
The most dramatic images tend to come either side of a storm, when the light is low and strongly directional and the cloud has bulk and separation. A clear, cloudless Miami evening is pleasant and comparatively plain.
As wallpaper
The two Miamis suit different uses. The Deco and Ocean Drive material is colourful, busy and close in, which is engaging but demanding behind icons. It works best on a secondary monitor or a phone, where there is less interface sitting on top.
The bay side skyline material behaves like other waterfront cities: a horizontal band of towers, a reflective foreground, a large quiet sky. That is the better choice for a primary working display, especially in the dusk versions where the upper sky has gone deep and the towers are lit.
