Ahead of you rises the Pérez Art Museum Miami, known as PAMM, one of the most striking buildings on the Miami skyline and a marker of the city's ambition to position itself as a global cultural capital. The museum opened in 2013 in a building designed by Herzog and de Meuron, the Swiss architectural firm responsible for the Tate Modern in London. The structure is a horizontal slab elevated above the waterfront on concrete pilotis, with a hanging garden of tropical vegetation cascading from its overhanging eaves — a tropical modernism that responds to the climate and the bay view simultaneously.
The collection focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century international art, with particular strength in Latin American, Caribbean, and African diaspora work that reflects Miami's actual cultural geography. The site was previously a bayside park and before that a container terminal. The transformation is staggering: from industrial freight to global art in a single generation.
Walk the waterfront terrace on the bay side for a view of Biscayne Bay, the causeway bridges, and the Frost Science Museum next door.