Federal findings fault Surfside tower's design as developer's family surfaces as art collectors

Federal investigators concluded this week that flaws in the original design and construction of Champlain Towers South led to the 2021 collapse that killed 98 people. The man who developed the building left behind a fortune and a family of art collectors, including works by Louise Bourgeois.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology released its technical findings on June 22, five years after the Surfside, Florida, tower fell. Investigators concluded the collapse began in early June 2021, weeks before the building fell, when two connections between garage columns and the pool deck failed.

"In the case of Champlain Towers South, however, these margins against failure were too narrow from the start," said Judith Mitrani-Reiser, a co-lead of the investigation.

The team traced the weakness back to the building's earliest days. Glenn Bell, the other co-lead, said the low margins against failure had two main causes.

“First, severe and widespread deviations in the building's original structural design from the codes and standards of the day, but also some limitations in those codes and standards,” Bell said. “Second, deviations in the building's construction from the design drawings."

Some areas of the pool deck and parking slab provided less than half the strength required by the codes of the day, NIST said. Builders placed reinforcing steel incorrectly and ran fewer reinforcing bars over columns than the design called for.

The findings describe the building's flaws and do not assign legal blame to any individual.

Nathan Reiber led the Canadian developer team that built the tower. He died in 2014, seven years before it collapsed.

Reiber moved to South Florida in the late 1970s and built a development empire along the Surfside beachfront, The Globe and Mail reported in a 2021 investigation. His consortium hired the project's architect, William Friedman, and its structural engineers, Breiterman Jurado & Associates.

To clear the way for Champlain Towers South, the developers paid $200,000 toward repairs to the town's overwhelmed sewer system, lifting a building moratorium, the Globe and Mail and the Miami Herald reported. Town officials approved a penthouse that exceeded Surfside's 12-story height limit.

Outside of Surfside, Reiber was involved in a number of lawsuits, according to the Globe and Mail, which documented decades of allegations of fraud across his projects in Ontario and Florida.

He agreed to resign his Ontario law license rather than be disbarred after a disciplinary summary cited "false or deceptive entries" in company records, the newspaper reported. He later pleaded guilty to tax evasion and paid a $60,000 fine.

In a 2009 bankruptcy tied to a Miami condo conversion, a trustee accused Reiber and his partners of improperly withdrawing more than $7.8 million from the development. The accusation was never tested in court.

By 2004, Reiber and his wife, Carolee, reported a net worth of more than $43.3 million in a financial statement. They were also avid art collectors.

Carolee Reiber lent a major Bourgeois fabric work to "Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child," on view at Gropius Bau in Berlin in 2022. In posts to social media from the show that summer, she stood before framed pages from Bourgeois's 2003 fabric book The Woven Child.

"Seeing my piece in the Berlin show," the caption said.

An online copy of the exhibition catalog appears to list the work as belonging to a "Private collection, Florida." The entry matches the title, date and object in Reiber's post. It does not name the collector.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden's spring 2009 magazine put Bourgeois's Spider on its cover and credited it to the "Private Collection Carolee and Nathan Reiber" in a photograph by Christopher Burke. A 2008 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou credited the same sculpture to the couple's Miami collection, according to a blog post by art historian Alain R. Truong.

Their patronage reached beyond Bourgeois. The University of Miami's Lowe Art Museum lists Barry Flanagan's Unicorned Hare on Crescent and Bell as a gift of Carolee and Nathan Reiber, and Joel Perlman's Island Star as a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Reiber.

The couple was among the sponsors of "Inka Essenhigh: Recent Paintings," a 2003 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, according to the Hamptons Art Hub.

Carolee Reiber has appeared at Miami art events over the years, been photographed at a 2016 Pérez Art Museum Miami salon on fakes and forgeries, and been listed at a 2018 Art Basel dinner hosted by Phillips and Bass.

And in a post to social media, Reiber called Jerry Gorovoy, the longtime confidant of Bourgeois who manages much of the artist's estate, a "dear, good friend for more than 20 years."

Gorovoy faces a lawsuit filed in October 2023 in New York Supreme Court under the state's Adult Survivors Act, which alleges he sexually assaulted and abused the artist Blair David Hines after first presenting himself as a mentor in the art world. Gorovoy has denied the allegations. Urgent Matter previously reported on the case.

NIST will now write its final report, which will recommend changes to building codes and practices. The collapse remains the subject of separate litigation in Florida courts.

Urgent Matter has reached out to Carolee Reiber for comment.

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