Snøhetta-Designed Sweetbird North Breaks Ground in Miami's Design District

Snøhetta, alongside developers Dacra and Raycliff Capital, and Mayor of the City of Miami Eileen Higgins, celebrated the official groundbreaking of Sweetbird North in Miami’s vibrant Design District on Wednesday, September 30.

Gathering at the project site on NE 40th Street, the event brought together Craig Robins, CEO and President of Dacra; Bippy Siegal, Chairman and CEO of Raycliff Capital; Craig Dykers, Founding Partner of Snøhetta; and Eileen Higgins, Mayor of the City of Miami for the first public presentation of the design.

The groundbreaking sets in motion construction of the eight-story, approximately 120,000-square-foot mixed-use office and retail building, with roughly 22,500 square feet of ground-floor retail. It is among the largest vertical developments to break ground in the Design District to date, a milestone that signals the neighborhood's broader urban shift.

“The Design District is entering a new phase, one that moves beyond its origins as a low-rise, retail-driven enclave toward a more complex, vertically articulated neighborhood,” said Nathan McRae, Project Director at Snøhetta, at the event. “Sweetbird North sits at the center of this shift. It reflects a moment when infrastructure, landscape, and architecture are no longer separate systems, but part of a continuous urban framework shaping the district’s next chapter.”

The new office and retail building is marked by a unique veil of coiled stainless-steel mesh. Draped and tensioned to a structural frame, the veil features exposed concrete bays and cantilevered scalloped terraces that alternate in length and geometry from floor to floor. Reading as a second skin, the building's exterior appears nearly transparent from head-on, becoming increasingly opaque at oblique angles and shifting throughout the day as the light changes.

The custom-engineered facade wraps the tower, functioning simultaneously as a sunshade, guardrail and hurricane-resistant exterior screen. Rather than treating Miami's stringent hurricane code as a technical constraint, Snøhetta folded the required impact glazing, reinforced concrete, and protective screening into a single architectural system. By reducing solar gain, the mesh lowers mechanical cooling loads and allows for highly transparent glazing throughout.

Each office floor opens on to its own planted terrace – a vertical landscape that transitions from tropical jungle-weight planting at the lower levels to flowering bougainvillea above, while a lush, landscaped roof crowns the building. The vegetation supports pollinators, retains stormwater, and contributes to air quality and the wellbeing of the people working within.

At street level, a podium designed with warm metal-clad columns and extended canopies frame the retail bays and spatially echo the trees lining the sidewalk below, creating a colonnade that belongs equally to the building and the block. Retail across the ground and second floors maximize glazing and frontage, opening the building fully to the pedestrian life of the street.

In contrast to the structure's direct neighbors, Sweetbird North adopts a restrained material palette of stainless steel, champagne-toned metals, exposed concrete, and layered landscape. The emphasis is placed on precision, proportion, and atmospheric depth rather than spectacle, allowing light and material to define the building’s identity.

With groundbreaking complete, crews will begin site and foundation work in the coming weeks. The project team plans to construct a full-scale mock-up of the façade veil this fall to test its performance ahead of fabrication, with installation of the veil system scheduled for the final phase of construction. A completion timeline will be announced as the project progresses.

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Prime Project Team:

Press Contact

Morten Moum

Group PR and External Communication Lead, Snøhetta AS

• mortenm@snohetta.com
• +47 92 43 51 59

• www.snohetta.com