Ocean Spray Hotel

The Ocean Spray Hotel is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by M.L.Hampton Associates, and built in 1936 in Miami, FL.

Ocean Spray Hotel is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Carol Arms Hotel between 1936 and 1939.
• Ocean Spay Hotel from 1939 until this day.

Its precise street address is 4130 Collins Avenue, Miami, FL. You can also find it on the map here.

The Ocean Spray Hotel 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 Ocean Spray Hotel was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on April 22^nd 2004.

At the time of its completion in 1936 the Ocean Spray Hotel incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included rooms with private bathrooms and gas heating in each room, unusual details in a hotel for middle-class clients during the 1920-30s.

M.L.Hampton Associates was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

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 Belsham & Hampton as the Main Contractor.

The Ocean Spray Hotel can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Ocean Spray Hotel was completed in 1936 during the last stretch of waht's officially considered to be the duration of the Art Deco movement. As a late-commer of the Art Deco movement and reflects the mature and refined characteristics of the style.

The Ocean Spray Hotel uses a frame structure made of concrete columns and beams.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features three main sections, with the main entrance located in the center, separating the windows that hug the corners, with shallow pillars originally painted in soft shades of green.

The entrance canopy has low-relief decorations, as does the central frieze on the seventh floor. The entrance features a double glass door with aluminum frames flanked by two wall sconces. In the center and on the sides of the pillars, there are windows with aluminum frames that accompany them up to the top floor. The spandrels on the upper floors are adorned with horizontal bands in yellow and white tones, running across the entire facade. The crowning of the building is made with a parapet of rectangular staggered perforations.