Fresh off Art Deco’s 100th anniversary, Miami Beach’s most iconic celebration is back in full swing. Art Deco Weekend, presented by the Miami Design Preservation League (MDPL), returns January 9-11 with three days of architecture, culture, music, design, and timeless glamour along historic Ocean Drive.
This year’s theme, “Celebrating Air, Land, and Sea,” explores how advances in technology during the 1920s and 1930s revolutionized travel—and in turn, transformed the landscape of leisure. With faster trains, elegant ocean liners, and the dawn of commercial flight came the golden age of resort destinations. Miami Beach emerged as one of its brightest examples, with striking Art Deco hotels rising to welcome this new generation of travelers.
Founded in 1977 by the MDPL, Art Deco Weekend was created to showcase and safeguard the architectural gems of Miami Beach. The annual event helped ignite a worldwide appreciation for the city’s pastel-colored skyline, forever linking Miami Beach to the enduring Art Deco legacy.
For this year’s edition, expect themed events that capture the spirit of the Jazz Age, from Lindy Hop dance lessons to live performances by Troy Anderson and The Hot Five, Michael Arenella and His Dreamland Orchestra, and the Mighty Flea Circus.
Ocean Drive, closed to traffic from 5th to 13th streets, transforms into a living museum of tropical style and nostalgia. More than 50,000 visitors are expected to enjoy free events and experiences, including an artisan market, guided architectural tours, a classic car show, films, lectures, and family-friendly activities like a kid’s club and dog parade.
As the world continues to commemorate a century of Art Deco, Miami Beach remains its beating heart—proof that the allure of streamlined curves, tropical hues, and nautical motifs still enchants.
A Brief History Of Art Deco
In 1925, the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts took over the Esplanade des Invalides in Paris. Twenty-one countries participated in the event, which was billed as an aesthetic renewal of the modern decorative arts, and, by most accounts, the birth of Art Deco. Miami Beach was one of multiple American cities to be swept up in the principles of this movement, which would have a profound impact on the town’s aesthetics, particularly in the area we now call South Beach.
During the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, dubbed “A Century of Progress,” the Florida Tropical Home by architect Robert Law Weed was exhibited (he also designed Miami Beach Fire Station No. 3 on Pinetree Drive, with its distinctive Art Deco style). Some of the biggest names who grabbed onto the trend in Miami Beach include Henry Hohauser, Lawrence Murray Dixon, Roy F. France, and the duo of Igor Polevitzky and Thomas Triplett Russell.
Their contributions include Dixon’s Hotel Victor, built on Ocean Drive in 1937, with its double-height lobby and porthole windows running along one side of the front of the building. Polevitzky and Triplett Russell designed the Albion in 1939, whose most eye-catching Art Deco feature is the implied circular form that rises above the streamlined corner of the building emblazoned with its name.
And there’s Hohauser’s 1935 Colony Hotel, which sits quaintly on Ocean Drive with “eyebrows” that extend out to shade the windows, a detail that was considered an early modernist move in Miami and Miami Beach.
“Between 1934 and 1942, around 1,200 pieces of architecture were built on Miami Beach,” notes Mark Gordon, the deputy director of the Miami Design Preservation League, the nonprofit founded by the late Barbara Baer Capitman to save and protect many of South Beach’s historic Art Deco structures. “Because of Art Deco, Ocean Drive is one of the most recognized streets in the world. When I go to Europe and tell people I’m from here, their eyes light up!” —Saxon Henry
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