April Key’s Ocean Drive: A Miami Road Trip Rebuilt in Neon

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 10 min

A packet of Kodachrome negatives found at an Istanbul flea market showed a Turkish couple’s road trip across 1950s America. April Key turned that discovery into Ocean Drive, a collection of laser-cut plexiglass and hand-bent neon sculpture shown in Milan’s Isola district during Milan Design Week 2019. The forms borrow the geometry of Miami Beach’s Art Deco hotels; the light comes from a craft Key describes as an endangered one.

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Every Ocean Drive story starts somewhere in Florida. April Key’s starts at a flea market in Istanbul.

In 2018, sorting through a stall at the city’s Feriköy market, the British designer found a packet of Kodachrome negatives showing a Turkish couple on a road trip through the United States in the early 1950s. They had bought a Cadillac and driven across the country, and among the frames were shots of Miami, with Ocean Drive’s low, sun-bleached hotels caught in the saturated colour that only Kodachrome produces. Key kept the negatives, and by April 2019 they had become a collection called Ocean Drive, shown in Milan’s Isola district during Milan Design Week, which ran from 9 to 14 April that year.

The collection is a set of sculptural light pieces, each one a building reduced to its silhouette: laser-cut matte white plexiglass shaped into the stepped, curved and porthole-punctuated forms of Streamline Moderne architecture, with hand-bent glass neon tracing the edges and lettering. The pieces carry names lifted from an imagined stretch of the strip, among them The Plaza, South Beach Theater, Harvey’s Bar, Capri Motel and Sunset Diner, each sized differently and available in a choice of neon colours.

What makes Ocean Drive worth returning to, seven years on, is not just that it is a well-made object. It is that the found photographs at its centre were never really about Miami. They were about a journey, made by two people who are not named in any account of the project, through a country that was not their own. Key, who had by then spent several years living and working in Istanbul herself, built a lighting collection out of somebody else’s act of arrival.

What the pieces are, physically

Each Ocean Drive piece works the same way. A flat or gently faceted body of laser-cut plexiglass, finished in matte white, is built up into a three-dimensional block that reads unmistakably as a small building: a stepped parapet, a rounded corner, a vertical fin, a marquee. Set into and around that plexiglass form is neon, hand-bent from glass tube and filled with gas to produce colour, following the lines of the architecture the way real neon signage once did on real buildings.

The scale is domestic rather than architectural. The Plaza stands 49 centimetres high on a 30 by 30 centimetre base. South Beach Theater runs to 34 centimetres in height and 44 in length. Harvey’s Bar, Capri Motel and Sunset Diner sit smaller again, closer in size to a substantial table lamp than a piece of furniture. Buyers choose the neon colour and, within the range Key offers, the size, which places the collection somewhere between limited-edition design object and made-to-order lighting.

The glass neon itself is rated for a working life of ten to fifteen years, the kind of figure that matters more to a collector than a gallery visitor, and it is a detail worth noting because it signals how seriously the making was approached. This was never meant to be a week-long Fuorisalone prop. It was built as a lighting product, with the specification to go with it.

The photographs, and what was actually in them

The version of this story usually told is that Key found some vintage photographs of Miami and was inspired by them. The fuller version, drawn from her own account of the discovery, is more specific and more interesting.

The negatives she found at Feriköy, one of Istanbul’s long-running flea and antiques markets in the Şişli district, were not a stranger’s holiday snaps. They documented a Turkish couple who had emigrated to Miami in the early 1950s, bought a Cadillac soon after arriving, and set off on a road trip across America. Ocean Drive, with its Streamline Moderne hotels and open-topped cars parked at the kerb, was one stop the negatives captured, rendered in the deep, slightly warm colour that Kodachrome film was known for and that later, more common colour stocks never quite matched.

That distinction matters because it changes what the collection is actually reconstructing. Key was not designing from a tourist’s view of a famous street. She was designing from the private record of two people’s arrival in a new country, at the exact moment their journey happened to pass through one of American architecture’s most photogenic corridors. The architecture and the energy of that discovery, in Key’s own description, became the foundation for the collection: a fusion of Art Deco-inspired architecture, lighting and sculpture that she has called a modern-retro futuristic cityscape.

April Key, and how she found the material to build it with

April Key was born in Scarborough, on England’s North Yorkshire coast, in 1991, and spent part of her childhood in Cyprus while her parents worked there. She studied Interior Architecture at Edinburgh College of Art, and during that course spent an exchange year at Istanbul Technical University in 2012. The exchange became a longer stay. Key remained based in Istanbul for more than a decade, running a studio and working with a team of local fabricators, before returning to Yorkshire in 2023.

It was in Istanbul, in 2018, that Key came across a small neon workshop, an encounter she has since described as the turning point for her practice. Handmade glass neon, bent tube by tube over an open flame and filled with gas to hold its colour, is a craft that has become rare as illuminated signage moved to LED, and Key has spoken of it explicitly as an endangered one, a form of craftsmanship she associates with an earlier era of city-making. Finding a workshop still practising it, in the same city and the same year she found the Kodachrome negatives, gave her both the material and the means to build Ocean Drive.

Her working method blends the analogue and the digital in a specific order. Photography, sketching and painting from the source material come first, translating a flat negative into a set of forms. Those forms are then modelled in three dimensions digitally before being sent for laser-cutting and neon fabrication, so that a found photograph passes through drawing, screen and workshop before it becomes an object. Key has described her practice as balancing three disciplines at once: architecture supplying the form, light acting as what she calls the provocateur to the eye, and art providing the visual language that ties the two together.

The craft behind the light

The people who actually make the neon in Ocean Drive are Istanbul artisans working in Key’s own studio, bending glass tubing by hand into the letterforms and outlines the design calls for. It is a slow, physical craft: each tube is heated, shaped and joined by eye, then filled with a specific gas mixture and electrode arrangement to produce its colour, a set of skills that takes years to learn properly and that fewer workshops now teach.

That the collection depends on this particular craft, rather than on LED strip built to imitate it, is not incidental to the design argument. Neon reads differently to LED at close range: the tube itself has thickness and imperfection, the light comes from the gas rather than from a covered diode, and the colour has a warmth that manufactured equivalents tend to flatten out. Ocean Drive’s Art Deco hotels were lit with exactly this kind of neon when they were built in the 1930s, so building the collection with the same handmade craft, rather than a modern substitute, is what lets the pieces read as continuous with the buildings they draw from rather than as a pastiche of them.

Why Ocean Drive’s own architecture carries so easily into a lamp

Miami Beach’s Art Deco Historic District holds more than 800 buildings constructed between 1923 and 1943, the largest concentration of the style anywhere in the world, and Ocean Drive is its best-known frontage. The district exists in its current form largely because of Barbara Baer Capitman, who founded the Miami Design Preservation League in 1977 after identifying the concentration of Streamline Moderne buildings along the strip as worth protecting rather than replacing, work that led to the area’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

The style itself, Streamline Moderne, is built from a small, repeatable vocabulary: rounded corners, stepped parapets, porthole windows, vertical fins and horizontal racing stripes, originally rendered in white or pale stucco and later repainted in the pastel palette most people now associate with the street. Neon signage was part of the district from the start, spelling out hotel names in cursive script mounted on the same vertical fins that define the architecture. It is a style that was always built to be read at a glance and from a moving car, which is precisely why it translates so readily into a small sculptural object: the forms Key is laser-cutting are already a kind of shorthand, condensed by the original architects into a few gestures a viewer can take in instantly.

Isola, and why a former industrial district suited the collection

Ocean Drive was shown in Isola, a district north of Porta Garibaldi that spent most of the twentieth century as one of Milan’s working-class industrial neighbourhoods before its factories and workshops began to close from the 1980s onward. Over the following decades it was gradually repopulated by studios, bars and independent design practices, and it has become one of the fixed points of Milan Design Week under the Isola Design District banner, alongside the officially ticketed halls at Rho Fiera.

The district’s appeal for a collection like Ocean Drive is straightforward. Isola’s venues during design week are converted workshops, courtyards and street-level spaces rather than trade-fair booths, which suits a set of objects built around the idea of a found photograph passed through a workshop. A neon-lit sculpture reading Sunset Diner sits more naturally in a repurposed industrial unit that still has some grease in its floor than it would under a convention centre’s fluorescent grid.

Where the collection went after Milan

Ocean Drive did not end with the week in Isola. Key continued to add pieces to it over the following years, among them The Plaza / Bauhaus Edition in 2020, Sunset Diner in 2021 and Olympia Arcade, also shown as part of the same series. The work found a second audience through YI Gallery, which gave the collection a dedicated viewing room from 30 March to 31 May 2022, and through online platforms including The Artling, extending its reach well beyond the original Milan Design Week showing.

Key’s practice has since moved again. In 2023 she returned to Yorkshire, completed a permanent neon installation at Leeds Corn Exchange, and received an Arts Council England award. She has since taken neon out of the city altogether with Enduring Neon: Pennines Edition, a year-long public art project built around monthly installations in Holmfirth, in the Pennine hills, describing the move as a deliberate shift from public installation in dense urban contexts to bringing light and colour into rural, everyday places. Ocean Drive, built from one migration story found in a Turkish flea market, turns out to be the first chapter in a practice that keeps returning to the same question: what a small amount of handmade coloured light does to a place that does not expect it.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to describe Ocean Drive as a design collection about Miami, and leave it there. That is the version the neon and the plexiglass invite at first glance: the palm-flat forms, the cursive glow, a familiar postcard of Ocean Drive rebuilt as a light fitting.

What actually sits behind the collection is smaller and more specific than a postcard. It is a packet of negatives showing two people, unnamed in every account of the project, on a road trip they made after arriving in a country that was not theirs. April Key found that packet in a flea market in a country that was not hers either, in the middle of a decade she spent building a practice in Istanbul before eventually returning home. The collection she built from it is, underneath its Streamline Moderne surfaces, an object about arriving somewhere new and choosing to keep the record of it.

That is also, in the end, why the craft matters as much as the concept. Hand-bent neon is slow, increasingly rare, and impossible to fake convincingly with a strip of LED. Building Ocean Drive with it, rather than around it, is what keeps the collection tied to the same handmade tradition that lit Ocean Drive’s real hotels in the first place. The light is the argument.