AN ADDRESS
A stone boat sits in Biscayne Bay in front of James Deering’s villa, built in 1916 to take the waves the house could not. It marks the line where Vizcaya ends and the sea begins, and the sea is now crossing it.
THE BARGE AT VIZCAYA, A STONE BREAKWATER IN BISCAYNE BAY. MIAMI, FLORIDA, 1916. PHOTO: LESLIE PLATT, CC BY 2.0.
Vizcaya faces the wrong way. James Deering, who built it on Biscayne Bay between 1914 and 1922, wanted the house approached from the water, so its grandest side is the one almost no visitor reaches today: the east façade, the only symmetrical face of the villa, opening onto a wide terrace that descends into the bay. He took up the house for the first time on Christmas Day, 1916, arriving by boat. The front door, in effect, was the sea.
A short row from that terrace sits a breakwater built the same year and shaped, with some humor, like a boat. It is reinforced concrete clad in coral stone, cut from the bay itself as the channel was dredged, so the thing that guards the shore is made of the shore. Its first task is plain. It takes the waves the terrace cannot.
THE BAY FAÇADE, WHERE THE HOUSE OPENS TOWARD THE WATER. PHOTO: MARY MARK OCKERBLOOM, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Its second task is harder to name. The Barge is neither house nor water. It is the line between them, the point where Vizcaya stops being architecture and becomes bay. Deering set Alexander Stirling Calder to carve it, and the figures, mermaids and grotesques among them, look outward toward open water, the way a building’s last wall faces the street. In Deering’s day the deck carried full-grown trees and a latticework pavilion, and could be reached only by boat. It is a threshold you cross by rowing.
A breakwater is a strange thing to make beautiful. Its whole purpose is to be struck, to stand in the open and take what the water brings so the rooms behind it do not have to. Deering could have sunk a plain barrier of rubble. He commissioned a sculpture instead, and set it where only the sea would ever see it up close.
THE EAST TERRACE LOOKING OUT TO THE BARGE AND THE OPEN BAY. PHOTO: MARY MARK OCKERBLOOM, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Calder took the commission in 1915 and worked the soft local limestone between 1917 and 1919. He was the middle of three sculptors, son of one and father of Alexander Calder, who would spend a career making sculpture move; the father’s work here is a boat in stone that has never gone anywhere. The limestone was chosen to look old on the day it was new. Deering wanted a house that seemed to have stood on the bay for centuries, and the Barge, porous and already weathering, sold that fiction better than anything else he built.
A century has called the bluff. Coral stone is soft, and salt and a hundred seasons of storms have worn Calder’s reliefs down to suggestions. The bay has risen past the line the Barge was drawn to hold. Its lower landing steps are underwater now, and they stay underwater. The breakwater built to keep the sea off the terrace is being taken by the sea instead.
Behind it, Miami has grown into a skyline Deering never saw. Florida likes to say it has no history, only weather and new arrivals, and then there is this: a hundred-year-old stone boat off Coconut Grove, holding a line in the water in front of a house built to be met from the sea. The Barge does not move. The bay comes to it.
THE BARGE WITH MODERN MIAMI BEHIND IT. PHOTO: LESLIE PLATT, CC BY 2.0.
Sources: Vizcaya Museum and Gardens; Historic American Landscapes Survey, Library of Congress; National Endowment for the Humanities. Photographs: Leslie Platt (CC BY 2.0) and Mary Mark Ockerbloom (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
— The Home&Decor Editors