View of the Future Through the Eyes of the Past
Interama exhibition shows vision of Miami

By Kevin Wynn

Tower of Freedom in the Festival Area at Interama. Inter-American Center Authority booklet, 1962. Photo: Historical Museum of Southern Florida.

Or maybe it was the pathological mid-century desire to build something on every swampy, unoccupied acre of South Florida real estate.

Whatever motivated the planners and schemers who dreamt up Interama, their vision—of an Inter-American trade and cultural center, gleaming in Atom-Age splendor on Biscayne Bay—never became real.

Interama kept untold numbers of planners, architects, lobbyists and glad-handers busy for a quarter of a century. But nothing was built.

Not the International Area, a kind of EPCOT of the Americas, where faux-Aztec statuary and red-tiled missions would have mixed-and-matched with MiMo restaurants and gift shops.

Not the Cultural Area, where a floating stage would offer theatre in the round not only to an audience in waterfront seats but to show fans cruising by in pleasure boats.

Not the 1,000 foot Tower of Freedom, Interama’s theme building, which was to rise from the center of a lagoon off Biscayne Bay, connected to the mainland by a transparent underwater passageway.

1967 Interama model. Parliamentary building designed by Marcel Breuer at top right Photo: Courtesy TBD

No trace of Interama exists. But the project produced hundreds of renderings and architectural drawings, dozens of pamphlets and photographs and scores of film clips. That’s the stuff that curators Allan Shulman and Jean-Francois Lejeune have brought together in “Interama: Miami and the Pan-American Dream”, the new exhibition at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida.

The gateway to it all is a re-creation of the Tower of Freedom’s underwater entranceway. It’s an aptly theatrical portal to the Space Age world of Interama, where a travel-brochure version of Latin America merged with a shiny, film-set vision of a supersonic future.

Interama started in 1951 with the idea of establishing a permanent meeting place of the Americas in Miami. The project waxed and waned through the 1960s before finally dying in 1975. Envisioned as a combination world’s fair, industrial park and amusement center, Interama changed with the times. One highlight of “Interama: Miami and the Pan-American Dream” is the way the exhibition charts those changes.

It all started as a relatively modest proposal. An early Hugh Ferriss rendering of a trio of buildings clustered around a pool could pass for a Morris Lapidus resort hotel.

Just a few years later, the expansive optimism of the early 1960s had clearly taken hold among Interama’s planners. A promotional booklet published in 1962 depicts a glittery phantasmagoria scattered across the bayfront site.

It’s Las Vegas meets La Paz.

Cultural Area at Interama. Inter-American Center Authority booklet, 1962. Photo: Historical Museum of Southern Florida.

In a huge, hallucinatory mural, astronauts and conquistadors strike heroic poses in a fantasy landscape cluttered with space stations, Mayan pyramids, Conestoga wagons and Chinese junks. Bulbous spaceship-shaped aerial trams swing on skinny wires from one swooping trapezoidal pylon to another.

The Jetsons have landed. On Tom Sawyer’s Island.

Hordes of visitors march confidently through the Tower of Freedom’s see-through underwater entrance as dolphins and manta rays frolic about them. The Tower of Freedom itself has morphed into a trio of terrifyingly attenuated, gleaming metal stalagmites with pointy, pod-shaped elevators sliding up and down their sides, carrying happy tourists to a dizzying series of restaurants and viewing platforms.

Because really, what is freedom without a good view and a nosh?

As the 1960s wore on, Interama’s designers and architects came slowly down to earth. Edward Durell Stone’s United States pavilion, a glittery flat-roofed structure with a glass and metal pyramid rising from its center, designed in 1967, still carries a hint of early-60s’ glitz. But an international village designed by Marcel Breuer the same year is cool and rational, built around regular, rectilinear waterways. It’s all very contained, more a university campus than a fun park. The crazy, gaudy dream is fading.

International Area at Interama. Inter-American Center Authority booklet, 1962 Photo: Historical Museum of Southern Florida.

Interama faded into history in 1975, when somebody finally realized there was no money to build it. Oleta River State Park and, ironically, a university campus now occupy the land where Interama would have been. Immigration and market forces made Miami the meeting place of the Americas without Interama and its glittering Tower of Freedom. Walt Disney’s EPCOT® took the idea of a permanent World’s Fair and ran with it—to the pine scrub of Orange County.

“Interama: Miami and the Pan-American Dream” charts Interama’s rise and fall and notes its modest influence on other projects. But the best part of the show is the way it allows visitors to walk through its transparent undersea tunnel and enter the gleaming, optimistic fantasy world of Interama – the world’s fair that never was.

“Interama: Miami and the Pan-American Dream” runs June 21 through January 25 at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, 101 W. Flagler St., Miami, in the Miami-Dade Cultural Center. www.hmsf.org.

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