400 plus pages. 400 plus photos. 23 contributors. Seven years in the making. Miami Modern Metropolis is an insanely ambitious book. Architect and scholar Allan T. Shulman has a restless mind and relentless drive — and our understanding of the Magic City is the better for it. At the book launch at the Bass Museum last night, Shulman confessed that he felt the need to be “comprehensive.” He was not joking when he added, “It’s a killer.”

It nearly killed me, and I was only a lowly copyediting and photosorting soldier, recruited into the project in the final year. Between the time Allan started and finished the book, he met and married his wife, designed and built several buildings on Miami Beach, and curated, opened, and closed the exhibit that inspired the book, Promises of Paradise, breaking records for attendance for a show at the Bass.

All the while he was thinking, thinking, thinking about three things: what makes Miami uniquely Miami? What makes the city modern? What makes it a metropolis? The book took so long to complete because the editor would not quit until he figured it all out. Miami is a paradox, he concluded. Or really 4 paradoxes:

1) It’s a resort town that wants folks to think it means business.

2) It’s a a bunch of isolated communities that sometimes dream of living together.

3) It wants to be rational and modern, but can’t help indulging in fantasy.

4) It’s an authentic, natural paradise that is so very carefully designed and tended to look like an authentic, natural paradise.

How can you know this is true? Drive through Miami and ask yourself questions. Why is the University of Miami built over water? What’s that crazy arch doing off the Palmetto? Why are those carports in front of the resort hotels so big? Why is there that endless condo canyon along Collins Avenue?

Allan T. Shulman and his collaborators on this beautiful book answer it all for you.