Anne GeggisIf West Palm Beach’s building official approves, it would be the tallest wooden structure in Florida.
What looks like a giant honeycomb — a never-seen-before, 25-story addition to West Palm Beach’s skyline — is slated to rise atop century-old city history in a downtown neighborhood with building height limits less than half that.
Plans show billionaire developer Jeff Greene is proposing a tower, “MiMar,” at Datura Street and South Dixie Highway, that promises a seaview in each of the 366 units stacked on an undesignated historical structure that once served as a city fire station in the early 1900s. The name translates roughly as “My Sea” in Spanish.
And it would be made from some retro material: wood, which the architect is calling “a hybrid mass timber and concrete structural system.”
Whether it should be built that way in a state with a propensity for hurricanes and termites is a matter of splintering opinions. But its height, exempted under a state law passed in 2023, is not up for debate.
Since MiMar’s May debut in front of the city’s preapplication committee, a Florida Building Commission vote in July failed to agree that wood products should be allowed for high-rises in the Florida Building Code.
Florida’s standards are stricter than 44 other states when it comes to wood construction for high-rises, according to building trade publications. That means it will be up solely to the city’s building official to decide whether that zig-zag façade can go up as wood.
Greene, who’s been in a legal tangle with the city over his other project, the yet unopened One West Palm at 550 Quadrille Blvd., said he’s confident the city will say “yes” to adding the geometric design atop the Mediterranean-revival style fire station dubbed “Datura Station.”
“I’m sure before it gets permitted, they’ll do all the testing to make sure that it’ll have the right strength that it needs to have to withstand the wind that Florida typically has,” Greene told Stet News.
Initial plans filed with the city under the state’s Live Local Act, however, don’t specify what MiMar will be made of, so city officials declined to comment on whether Greene’s honeycomb-styled building would be permitted to reach for the sky as wood.
The case for – and against – engineered timber
If built as announced, MiMar would be the tallest wooden structure in the state, according to wood industry trade publications. Those bragging rights belong to T3 FAT Village, a six-story office building that just opened in September in Fort Lauderdale.
The Florida Building Code, vaunted as the strictest in the country since Hurricane Andrew’s devastation in 1992, requires that steel, reinforced concrete and masonry be used to construct high-rises.
The Florida Building Commission in July voted in favor of including mass timber in the code, but the 9-4 vote fell short of the margin required to change it, according to industry reports. Under state building codes, that means the decision will fall to Robert Brown, the city’s building official.
And the project’s principals are putting their best case forward.
A September news release from CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, the Italian architecture firm, highlights how the mass timber and concrete structural system will reduce the customary pollution such a project would represent.
Engineered timber used for construction is getting more notice as an eco-friendly alternative to steel and concrete, according to a May 2025 article in the scholarly journal, Building and Environment.
The article estimates that steel and concrete account for a significant portion of the global greenhouse emissions because of the chemical processes and substances used to make it. A timber building had 25% less greenhouse gas emissions than a reinforced concrete one, the article said.
Plus, it will present much less hassle for residents who are fed up with the disruption that’s come with the bumper crop of cranes overhead, sliding steel beams into place as downtown experiences an unprecedented burst of growth.
That’s because they can build it off site.
“Beyond reducing embodied carbon, this material strategy enables advanced off-site fabrication,” says a release from the architectural firm collaborating on the project with Greene. The firm, CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, also is working on the nearby Greene School and master plans for Currie Park and the Miami Beach Convention Center.
“Modules are produced in controlled conditions and assembled on site, shortening construction time and limiting disruption in a dense downtown block.”
The sound of a city growing upward has become a part of the protest from residents sounding off about the city’s downtown plan.
“You have no idea what we’re going through right now,” said Carole Meade, who lives in a North Flagler Drive building between construction of the Ritz Carlton and Shorecrest buildings, both slated to rise to the city’s maximum height of 306 feet.
Blocked lanes, swinging cranes and reverberations that have cracked interior walls at her building were among her laundry list of complaints.
Skipping City Commission review
Two major issues of contention with downtown development won’t be up for debate if MiMar moves closer to reality.
The proposal is among four projects that have been filed with the city since April under the state’s Live Local Act. The law stops cities from rejecting housing proposals on land zoned for commercial or mixed-use because of height or density. It allows builders committing 40% of the project to workforce housing to build to the height of the tallest and densest development within one mile.
Most importantly, the law paves the way for developers to move forward without enduring the contentious public hearings before city planning boards and elected officials that so often block their ambitions.
Even in downtown, where high-rises are becoming more common, the building is likely to stick out since the Datura-Dixie neighborhood, just one block north of Clematis Street, is restricted to eight stories.
Under state law, in exchange for loosened building limits, the building has to offer at least 40% of the proposed units at rates affordable to those making up to 120% of the area median income.
In West Palm Beach, that would be up to $108,000 for a household of one to $154,000 for a household of four members, figures from the Florida Housing Finance Corp. show.
And, in keeping with democratizing downtown housing, every unit would have a view of the city’s waterfront, according to the architect’s prepared statement.
“In the collective imagination, Palm Beach is the antithesis of affordability,” says Carlo Ratti, founding partner of CRA and professor at MIT and the Politecnico di Milano, in the statement.
“Yet this is precisely what drew us to this project: Could we make coastal living accessible to all? And could we give everyone the same sea views?”
A storied past and present
The building’s two-story base and its bell tower will stay, even if the Mediterranean-era Revival style contrasts with the geometric design atop it.
“It’s not a landmark, but we love keeping things that are beautiful and old,” Greene told Stet News. “We’ve done that before. We preserved the first power plant in Manhattan when we built a 25-story building on top of that. It was called the Morris Electric Light Company, the first power plant of Manhattan. … We could have torn that down, but we kept it.
“We built 19 stories above it, kept the six-story facade, which still looks like it did in 1870,” Greene continued. “We did that in New York City, and we’d love to do it in West Palm Beach.”
Bricked arches frame the street-facing windows and a curved entranceway draws customers into Leila Restaurant, a tapas restaurant closed for renovations.
Heading north on Dixie toward Clematis, a host of small businesses line the street — eyebrow threading, massage and Euro currency exchange among them. The awning to the main entrance of Datura Station is torn, and one of the temporary signs on the building is drooping, revealing that it used to be a coffee joint.
Susan Salisbury, a former Palm Beach Post reporter who is now doing work for Stet News, used to go in the building regularly one summer when she was a teenager working for the family business, J.J. Cater Furniture Co., in the late 1960s. The main store was adjacent to the fire station, and it didn’t really strike her as historic at the time.
“We had odds and ends there, stuff that was marked down,” she recalled.
She didn’t really like it when customers asked to see what was there: No air conditioning.
Shown a picture of the proposal, Salisbury sighed. “West Palm Beach has already been ruined, but why do we need to keep building 25-story buildings?
“The contrast between the historic fire station building and the proposed modernistic building is jarring.”
