One Thousand Museum

Zaha Hadid designed exactly one residential tower in the Western Hemisphere, and it stands at 1000 Biscayne Boulevard. One Thousand Museum wears its structure on the outside. A curving white exoskeleton of glass-fiber-reinforced concrete carries load down the corners and edges, which lets the interiors open up with far fewer columns than a tower this slender usually needs.

Project Scope

• 62 stories rising 707 feet, made up entirely of half- and full-floor residences, duplex townhomes, and a single duplex penthouse.
• An exoskeleton assembled from roughly 5,000 GFRC pieces, fabricated in Dubai and shipped in early in construction.
• Plaza Construction as construction manager and general contractor, with structural design by DeSimone Consulting Engineers and CAPFORM handling the concrete.
• Completed in 2019 at a total project cost near $450 million.

Why It Matters

It’s the only Hadid residential high-rise in the Americas, and one of the last buildings she shaped before her death in 2016. The exoskeleton is the whole idea: structure and identity in the same gesture, a building you recognize from blocks away. The GFRC fabrication and assembly were involved enough that the project landed on a PBS documentary about hard builds. For Miami’s luxury market, it set a bar that later towers still measure against.

Project Team & Details