MIRAI Design District has officially broken ground, following the close of an $85 million construction loan from Monroe Capital and marking Kengo Kuma's first mixed-use development in the United States. The milestone arrives after years of patient assemblage along Northeast Second Avenue by a consortium of Leviathan Development, Lionheart Capital, Well Duo, and The Lane Organization, who together have positioned MIRAI as the next architectural anchor of Miami's Design District.
Kengo Kuma and Associates has designed the building as a "floating lantern" — a transparent ground floor opening to a lush central garden, wrapped in a layered façade screening system that filters light and softens the building's presence on the street. The vocabulary draws on Kuma's defining preoccupation with weaving architecture, nature, and cultural experience into a single gesture, now adapted for the tropical density of South Florida. Landscape design comes from Island Planning Corporation, led by Nathan Browning, with celebrated Italian lighting house Viabizzuno designing a dynamic façade lighting program intended to give the building a second life after dark.
The program totals roughly 57,000 square feet — 41,000 square feet of Class A boutique office space stacked above 16,000 square feet of luxury high-street retail and hospitality. The office floors are positioned for family offices, small and mid-sized funds, and design-led businesses seeking spaces that read as extensions of their own identity, with leasing kept in-house in response to early demand. At ground level, MIRAI is conceived less as a commercial podium and more as a public room — a hospitality-forward extension of the neighborhood threaded with cultural programming, gathering spaces, and curated retail.
For Lionheart Capital founder and CEO Ophir Sternberg, the groundbreaking is the moment a long-held thesis on Northeast Second Avenue materializes; for Leviathan Development founder Allison Greenfield, it is a deliberate effort to advance the Design District culturally and architecturally rather than simply add square footage. That ambition aligns MIRAI with a growing concentration of globally recognized architects and design-led commercial concepts reshaping the corridor, and helps position Northeast Second Avenue as the district's next boutique luxury frontier. Tenant curation, hospitality partnerships, and cultural programming are still in active development, with additional announcements expected as construction progresses.
Completion is anticipated by the end of 2028.