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Tuesday, 23 October 2007 | Levent OZLER
Casadecor Miami 2007
Gardens at Casadecor Miami will Highlight Sustainable Materials
CASADECOR Miami, the innovative international showhouse, will feature lavish gardens, transforming the surrounding site of the repurposed parking garage that serves as its unique home. Both established and up-and-coming landscape architects and designers will create an elegant oasis that highlight the latest in "green" gardening.
Jefre Figueras Manuel, a pioneering, Orlando-based landscape designer known for his sophisticated "couture" landscape designs that blend art, fashion, architecture to create sustainable, environmentally aware spaces, has created the garden master plan. Under his direction, each unique outdoor space will be connected with a unifying diagonal canal, beginning with Manuel's Lexus Hybrid Living Sculpture Garden. Located at the entrance to the showhouse, the centerpiece of the space will be a Lexus RX 400h hybrid luxury sport utility vehicle that combines an electric motor with a gasoline engine for improved fuel mileage and fewer smog-forming emissions, without sacrificing performance or style.
The garden's elliptical form will evoke the Lexus logo and also serve as containment for pioneering ideas about environmental sustainability. Manuel will use artificial turf, recycled composite wood, and mounds of recycled glass in his design. Also, he will incorporate a type of vertical garden known as a "living wall." Plants are rooted in fibrous material that is anchored to a wall, providing insulation and air purification while requiring less water than a traditional horizontal planting. Covering a second wall will be a 12' x 8' topographic map of Florida, depicting both the current coastline and a projected coastline, based on the projected rise in sea levels caused by global warming.
 Miami's star architect Chad Oppenheim, founder and principle of OPPENheim Architecture + Design, will also be participating in the creation of CASADECOR Miami's gardens. In keeping with the design principles and aesthetics adhered to in all of this cutting-edge firm's projects-linking designs to the climate and topography of a given site, choosing inspired materials, and utilizing efficient, "green" technology-Oppenheim will present a whimsical secret garden filled with unexpected treasures and enchantment. Created as a sensual livingscape of romantic modernism, the space will blend lush vegetation and luxurious comfort and will feature baroque exterior furniture, luxe living accessories by socially responsible and environmentally sensitive companies in flirtatious patterns and textures. Alternascapes will contribute environmentally friendly, and surprisingly realistic, artificial turf.
Since its inception in 1985 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, CASADECOR has been transforming abandoned landmarks, municipal buildings, churches and castles in Europe and Latin America into elegant, decorated, showhouses where discerning homeowners, decorators, designers and design enthusiasts experience new design trends and the latest technologies. For CASADECOR's second year in Miami, it will bring together more than 60 top international designers, architects, manufacturers and sponsors to redesign a 50,000 square foot, multi-level parking garage on Biscayne Boulevard near the new Performing Arts Center. The showhouse will include replicated lofts, apartments, studios, libraries and gardens and provide a unique opportunity for visitors to see how designers and manufacturers apply creative vision and technological innovation to overcome design challenges.
Casadecor Miami 2007
Emerging Landscape Architects and Designers Will Create "Green" Urban Oasis
Nov. 8 - Dec. 16, 2007
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