Located at the Southern Gateway to downtown Miami’s Brickell financial district, 1450 Brickell is a 35-story, 586,000-square-foot Class A office tower that features panoramic views of the city and Biscayne Bay one block away. It was Miami’s first LEED Gold–certified private office building and is one of the city’s most resilient. The office tower was designed with impact resistant glass windows that can withstand the force of large projectiles as well as winds approaching 300 miles per hour, an important building defense in this hurricane-prone site. When it was completed in 2010, 1450 Brickell incorporated the strongest curtain wall window system of any commercial building in the nation.

In 2005, Alan Ojeda, the founder and CEO of Rilea Group, began planning 1450 as the second phase of a two-acre mixed-use project on Brickell Avenue, Miami’s Wall Street. (The first phase was the 36-story One Broadway apartment building. The project also includes a parking garage with 1,200 spaces, located in the lower floors of the office building, and an adjacent 12-story parking structure, which has a rooftop terrace). The 2005 commercial real estate market in Miami was in transition as a result of overbuilding and heavy damage along Brickell Avenue from Hurricane Wilma. Many high-rise buildings lost windows, suffered extensive damage, and were out of commission for an extended period.

The Miami-Dade code for commercial buildings required that the first 30 vertical feet of a building have large-missile impact-resistant glass to withstand high winds and impacts from flying debris; above 30 feet, glass had to resist small-missile impacts. But the damage from Hurricane Wilma convinced Ojeda that the code was not adequate.

Ojeda recalled that when he surveyed the area after the storm, the streets were littered with glass from windows as high as the 25th floor that had exploded or imploded. The developer, who had been planning the office building with a glass curtain wall, determined that hurricane-resistant glass needed to be even stronger and, if it was required to protect the first 30 vertical feet of a high-rise building, “why not do it for the other 500 feet?”

Mitigating Risks

Completed in 2010, the $250 million building is constructed with a poured-in-place reinforced concrete structural system that uses post-tensioned one-way slabs and beams. The entrance, lobby, and elevator corridors are elevated eight feet above grade to reflect the slope of the site, which is higher on the north side, and to raise the lobby base above the floodplain to avoid the impacts of flooding during hurricanes. The ground level also includes a breezeway, two retail banks, and spaces for two restaurants; one restaurant is at street level within the floodplain, but it includes a system of glass panels that can be put in place for protection during storms.