Megacenter Brickell mixed-use project wins UDRB approval

The city of Miami’s Urban Development Review Board on Wednesday approved a 148-foot-tall building near Little Havana just west of I-95 and the Brickell area that will include storage, offices, apartments, and a wrap-around mural.

Called Megacenter Brickell, the two tower project designed by Borges + Associates Architects’ principal Reinaldo Borges will be built at 420 Southwest Seventh Street and 427 Southwest Eighth Street. It will include a rooftop terrace, 57 “workforce housing units,” six levels of mini-storage, four levels of boutique office space, 10,000 square feet of ground floor retail, and 111 basement-level parking spots. The project is just under 200,000 square feet in size, according to Borges.

There will also be an artistic mural wrapped around the building that will change intermittently, Borges told the board during its meeting. “We will work with the city’s planning department staff on various art installations on the property,” Borges added.

To build the project, the developer, Megacenter Brickell LLC, needed to obtain 11 waivers from the board, including a 30 percent reduction in the amount of required parking.

UDRB member Fidel Perez was initially worried about all the proposed uses Megacenter Brickell would utilize. “That makes the project a little more difficult,” Perez said.

“This has all the complexity of urban infill one can imagine,” Borges admitted. However, the project is surrounded by major state roads and the logistics of the structure have been addressed by the builders, Borges said.

The project itself is being built by a partnership that includes Red Megacentro, a Chilean-based company that has built 40 storage facilities in Chile, Peru, and Miami. The 31,366 square feet of land where Megacenter Brickell is slated to be built was bought by Patricio Ureta and Pablo Wichmann in July 2015 for $7.9 million, according to the Miami-Dade property records. Back in 2012, according to a Borges Architects press release, Ureta and Wichmann partnered with Red Megacentro to “develop its business model in the United States.”

“Since 2013, Ureta and Wichmann have been responsible for the acquisition and development of several projects throughout Miami with an expected total area over [1 million square feet] at completion by the end of 2017,” Borges said in the release.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified the development site as being located in The Roads neighborhood. It is actually located between southeastern Little Havana and the Brickell area.