One Thousand Museum

One Thousand Museum is a 62-storey residential tower in Miami, Florida, standing 215 metres (707 feet) tall. It was completed in 2019 at 1000 Biscayne Boulevard, across from Museum Park, and was designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, from an initial design by Zaha Hadid herself.

The tower is known for its curving white exoskeleton, a skin of concrete that wraps around the glass walls and partly hides the balconies. Because of its shape people nicknamed it the Scorpion Tower. The concrete frame thins toward the top, and the building ends in an open crown with a helipad on the roof, which is rare for an apartment building. It is considered an ultra-luxury building with only about 84 large apartments.

How does the exoskeleton work?

The curving outer frame does more than decorate the building. It also carries the weight of the tower, so the rooms inside can have fewer columns. Engineers covered the columns in glass-fibre reinforced concrete moulds to get the smooth finish the architect wanted. Wind loads on such a tall, curvy shape are strong, and that is one reason the foundations had to be so deep.

How deep are the foundations?

To hold up the tower, the builders drilled piles to record depths of more than 170 feet (about 52 metres). Two of those piles broke a record for Miami-Dade County, which had only just been set at another tower in Sunny Isles Beach. In early 2018 the tower was featured in the PBS series Impossible Builds, which called it one of the most complex skyscrapers ever to leave the drawing board.

On the globe

The model shows a glass tower wrapped in a white curving exoskeleton that thins toward an open crown with a helipad. Look at the lattice-like frame.