The Palace is sited on Biscayne Bay just south of Miami's financial district, a mile-long stretch of concrete-and-glass office buildings that is referred to as Brickell. Where the street bends to follow the bay shoreline, it becomes residential. The Palace was the first of these residential buildings to be built and is the tallest condominium building in the city; it has 255 apartments on 42 floors.
Compositionally, The Palace has three elements: a main tower, a smaller terraced building intersecting the tower, and a podium lined with town houses along the waterfront. The town houses, constructed of light gray stucco with pipe-railing balconies and rooftop terraces, camouflage a two-story parking structure at the building's base.
The terrace building seems to intersect the tower, stepping up from the bay and then emerging on the other side of the building. When viewed from a distance it appears to be a giant stairway. At the front of the building, however, it becomes a monumental porte-cochere. Residents arrive along an angled driveway lined with aged royal palms, which were already on the site and were conserved.
The tower derives its scale and monumentality from the double-sized, two-story square grid. The grid emphasizes the contrast between the tower and the much shorter terrace building and distorts the reflections in the silver glass apartment windows, framing them as if they were paintings.
The main building is a thin slab tower constructed so it has three elevator cores, each serving two apartments; this configuration gives the apartment views of both the bay and the city. The three-story glass cube at the top is a single penthouse apartment.
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