The Bacardi Building

What It Is

The Bacardi Building is a slim tower on Biscayne Boulevard, completed in 1963 and long considered one of Miami's finest works of Miami Modern, or MiMo, architecture. Its most striking feature is a skin of decorative blue-and-white ceramic tile that wraps the upper floors, a design that reads almost like a tapestry hung on the facade. A separate, later glass annex on the site carries an abstract mural in stained glass. The complex served as the U.S. headquarters of the Bacardi company, whose family had built a rum fortune in Cuba and relocated their corporate base abroad after the revolution nationalized their assets.

Why It Matters

The building is a physical record of one of Miami's defining patterns, the arrival of established Latin American capital that did not start over so much as relocate. Bacardi was already a global brand when it landed on Biscayne Boulevard, and it announced itself with architecture rather than a storefront. That is the MiMo era in miniature, a confident, design-forward Miami absorbing money and talent displaced from the Caribbean. It is also an early, literal expression of the city's role as a Latin American business capital that happens to sit inside U.S. borders, a foreign empire choosing Miami as its American home.

Neighborhoods: Edgewater Eras: The MiMo / Postwar Boom