Financial Times

The Beijing-based, German-born architect Ole Scheeren has designed the centrepiece café for the fair. “Stage” is a theatrical platform for food as performance, a shimmering, mirrored mirage of an object floating in the centre of the tent.

Conceived for New York deli Dean & DeLuca (now a global chain), the installation draws parallels with the 1970s art scene in SoHo — an island of creativity within a then-dying downtown, where the original deli was established in 1977 — and the glimmering newness of Miami and its passion for contemporary design. Its surface creates a complex topography, a landscape of bowls and depressions in which to display the food.

Scheeren’s shiny bar will be counterbalanced, outside the show, by SHoP’s “Flotsam & Jetsam”. A dynamic arching sculpture under which visitors can walk to enter the fair, it is intended to become a permanent pavilion there. The work’s 3D-printed organic form combines high-tech manufacturing with references to the sea, the shore and the open-air lifestyle of the city in its coppery tentacles. This is architecture, furniture and billboard all in one.

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