Craig Robins is known to the worlds of architecture, interior design, historic preservation and real estate as the innovative developer who founded Dacra, one of the first companies that in the late eighties began to rehabilitate run-down properties in Miami Beach's Art Deco District. For the past six years the thirty-eight-year-old entrepreneur has brought about the reemergence of Miami's Design District, an eighteen-block sector that he is transforming into what is to be the center of the interior design industry in South Florida.

Currently he is in the process of building Aqua, a gated island neighborhood that promises to be unlike any other, anywhere. The architecture of the town houses and mid-rise apartment buildings will be consistently modernist, with no traces of postmodernist pastiche or reproductions of historic styles. Given the belief of developers in the United States that the speculative housing market always requires traditional design, Robins's choice to go modernist throughout is a rare and significant town planning event.

Aqua, located near the northern boundary of Miami Beach, is under construction on an eight-and-a-half-acre tip at the southern end of Allison Island, an approximately forty-acre narrow strip of land surrounded by a wide waterway named Indian Creek. On the site was a former hospital complex. Aqua offers panoramic views of neighboring shorelines in three directions: To the east lies Miami Beach's famous Collins Avenue, with its high-rise apartments and hotels; to the south is a long vista of the pleasure-boat- and dolphin-inhabited water; and to the west is a stately series of large, well-landscaped houses with lawns bounded by the water's edge.

After the hospital closed, the property went on the market. Robins acquired the land at a very favorable price because he took a chance and made his purchase before the site had been rezoned for residential use. Most developers want maximum heights and densities for maximum profitability; Robins, how-ever, favors low densities and height limitations, believing that such measures protect the land, make it more livable and honor the concerns of the surrounding communities.

As it turned out, the residential rezoning codes for the site were devised by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, whose firm, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, was chosen by Robins to develop the master plan for Aqua. DPZ is best recognized for the design of two towns-Seaside, Florida, and Kentlands, Maryland. She and her partner, Andres Duany, are also the founders of a movement they call New Urbanism, which advocates incorporating the principles of traditional small-town planning into the development of cities and neighborhoods.

In the project's early stages Plater-Zyberk worked with architects Walter Chatham and Alison Spear to see if any of the old hospital buildings could be adaptively re-used. The team discovered that only the seven-level parking garage met the standards of the current hurricane codes; all of the other structures had to be torn down. "That was good news," recalls Spear. "We'd been trying unsuccessfully to revive them and make something out of their weird floor plans." The architects decided that because the garage was adequate for parking the cars for all three proposed apartment buildings, it should remain, while the rest of the site would become a clean slate. "Liz and her team went back to their drawing boards and came up with an overall plan that really worked."

When completed in thirty months, Aqua will be preeminent among similar luxury communities in Florida be-cause of the splendid way it relates to the water. Developers of other water-oriented sites place the most ex-pensive houses or apartment buildings near the water's edge, bordered by landscape accessible only to the owners. In such layouts, there are no water views from the streets or from the other, less costly houses built on so-called dry lots. There will be no dry lots in Aqua.

A continuous tree-shad-ed promenade spanning the length of the shore is intend-ed for strolling and biking and is lined by small private docks. At the southern tip is a landscaped plaza with an immense neighborhood pool. All streets extend to the promenade, offering vistas of Indian Creek, while town houses that do not face the water have oblique views of it from balconies and terraces overlooking the streets. The design includes tree-sheltered sidewalks, a small town square and mango and citrus groves.

Aqua will consist of forty-six four-story single-family town houses, and three mid-rise apartment towers situated on the eastern edge of the site. The town houses are assembled in four blocks bounded by an asymmetrical street network. Block sizes vary: The smallest comprises six town houses; the largest, fifteen.

While DPZ, Chatham and architect Alexander Gorlin, another principal participant, each produced town house designs, Robins hoped for a larger number of different architects to collaborate on the low-rise housing. He chose six firms: Brown Demandt, Hariri & Hariri, EFM Design (Emanuela Frattini Magnusson), Suzanne Martinson, Albaisa Musumano and Allan T. Shulman. Each town house configuration will be repeated several times at various locations in the master plan.

Plater-Zyberk and her team were careful to consider how the newly created neighborhood would look to those dwelling outside the gate. Occupants of the houses on the rest of Allison Island, and along the nearby western rim of Indian Creek, were opposed to the construction of the three apartment buildings. Helping the proposal win acceptance was Robins's decision that each of the mid-rises be designed by a leading architect. He is so pleased with the result that he has named each one after its creator. They will be known as the Chatham, the Spear and the Gorlin.

"I'm basically styling a parking garage," is the modest claim made by Chatham, the designer of the northernmost apartment building-the preexisting garage with four condominium floors added to the roof. There will be four huge high-ceilinged apartments occupying each floor. At the ground level will be a pool and health club, as well as office space and a convenience store.

The apartment structure at the center of the three is by Spear. De-signed as two linked buildings, it fronts the neighborhood square on one side and the waterfront promenade on the other. Within its base, except for the entrance drive and lobby, double-height town houses line the side-walks and promenade, creating a gentle transition from mid-rise to low. At two corners on the upper facades, stacks of deep balconies are interrupt-ed by cubelike three-story tiers of glass curtain walls, which enclose the additional space afforded apartments without balconies. "I love the way these volumes work architecturally," says Spear, pointing out how the façades become more interesting be-cause of the play among the projecting and receding planes.

The southernmost apartment building, by Gorlin, occupies the most open and dominant site of the three, with un-interrupted views to the east, south and west. Like its neighbor by Spear, a portion of the first two floors are town houses with simple, flat curtain wall facades; the rest consists of a lobby and club. Above this level are nine floors with sweeping views of Indian Creek as it widens southward to become a broad river. "My building," Gorlin explains, "is a mild critique of the typical developer tower with façades that are either all stripes of windows, spandrels and balconies or the flat-glass surfaces of an unarticulated curtain wall." By means of projecting and receding sur-faces, deep shadowed balconies, extended sunscreens, fenestration patterns and a wavelike roof, Gorlin has created a layering of surface not usually seen in a developer building.

When completed, this mid-rise will have an expressive power that be-fits its pride of place in the Aqua ensemble. The first building to be seen from the pleasure boats heading north on Indian Creek and the most visible from the waterfront communities to the south, it will be the landmark of a new urban neighborhood that is mostly low-rise and made green by interior town house court-yards, little parks and treelined streets. It is fitting, and even inspiring, that I Craig Robins and his team of planners and architects, while carefully I designing a private gated community, kept the greater landscape, and its public, so well in mind.