Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club

The Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Roy F. France, and built in 1940 in Miami, FL.

Its precise street address is 3925 Collins Avenue, Miami, FL. You can also find it on the map here.

The Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Miami and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on August 25^th 2005.

The building has been restored 3 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1956, 2004 and 2018.

Roy F. France was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Melvin Grossman.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was P.J. Davis Construction Co. as the Main Contractor.

The Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club's strucutre consists of concrete blocks load bearing walls.

This means that both the facade and some of the interior walls are structural, and play a curcial role in supporting the building all the way down to the foundations.This solution is cost-effective and straightforward for low and mid-rise buildings, but does not allow for very flexible interior spaces. Structural bearing walls cannot be demolised or easily altered, and even opening new doors and passageways on any of them would requiere a meticulous structural analysis.

This also means that the openings on the facade have to be limited in size and are usually evenly distributed to allow vertical forces to make it's way down.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a symmetrical, wide central vertical panel divided into three sections, rounded at the ends, and two additional flanking panels set further back from the road on each side. A centered pinnacle, adorned with decorative details at the top, is the highest point of the building, with tall steps descending on both sides.

Vertical bands of windows alternate with smooth vertical panels. The central section features small 1x1 vertically placed windows within the wide central panel.

Another material found at the Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club is terrazo, used in floors.