 I'm really, really happy and excited to be introducing this event today. It's very rare to have a kind of perfect intersection between colleagues that one admires, friends, great, fantastic architects and designers, alumni, and a really interesting city that has been the site of architectural and urban experimentation now for at least two decades. And to be, in particular, introducing one of the people who enabled that city to become such a site of architectural experimentation. Terence Riley, who's a G-SAP alum, this fantastic architect and probably one of the most influential sort of curators and critics that have, you know, kind of practiced in the U.S. and internationally over a few decades, five years to use a few decades. I think that Terry has started his curating practice at Ross Gallery, actually, where I remember once I was having coffee with Bernard Chumi and Bernard said, you know, Ross is so important. Look at what Terry did after curating great shows and here at the school. And after Ross, Terry served as the Philip Johnson chief curator for architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art from 91 and 2006. Not obvious to have a practicing architect in that role and Terry certainly shaped MoMA and architecture at that time. I remember personally seeing the Light Construction Show, which was quite influential at the time on studying at McGill and kind of always coming to New York to get sort of higher level architecture actually really influential only personally, but also the show on the Emerging Institute and the Spanish emerging scene and so many, you know, and also so many incredible shows on Rampool House and, you know, really featuring architects as they were emerging. And then from 2006 to 2010 he was the director of the Paris Art Museum in Miami and led the institution through its transformative planning and design with, you know, incredible now new building designed by Herzog and Limeroy. And again, I think the ability for someone to be, you know, as an architect occupy these various roles, practice architecture, curate architecture but also commission architecture I think is incredibly unique and inspiration and a model for us here at school where we think about architecture as a kind of expanded practice as a way to look at the world and to kind of give it shape. And so today Terry will focus specifically on Miami as a project in itself and the design district in particular and how shaping ideas about that city he enabled a number of emerging architects to really, you know, build and experiment and have the kind of freedom that we're always kind of looking for. So please join me in welcoming back Terence Ray. Aside from the design district which has been a project that has been in development I would say for about 12 years or 15 years a single developer trying to turn around a neighborhood to sit down at the heels and the arrival of Art Basel, the very broad sort of rethinking and architecture didn't really, hadn't really occurred yet. In, I think it was eight years ago, I wrote an article for the Miami Rail which is the Brooklyn Rail's cousin. And it was based on the growing agreements between extremely well-known international architects and Miami developers. And this was not the status quo, absolutely not the status quo. And that's Zaha's building of a thousand parts. The development of Miami and the relationship to its architecture was more traditionally done by developers. George Merrick being one of them. He invented this town called Progables and his company would provide imagery like this and make the suggestion that this kind of American dream for a castle in Spain could be an actuality. I mean this became, Progables became the sort of historic Mediterranean counterpoint to another fantasy which was vastly growing on the beach. And that was this sort of deco, international style, glitzy, whatever you might want to call it, Tel Aviv, Rio, etc. So this was totally unprecedented, really. And it didn't stop with Zaha. This is Two Towers by Bjork Engels in Coconut Grove. And it just has become, I mean one of the big questions I had in the book is this real love affair or is this going to be a terrible date? And I would have to say that the architects have done a really good job I think of educating the developers. The building here is, we're talking around again, and by kind of embedding their orthogonal plan inside a diagonal volume it helps them generate this skin that, you know, from a distance might look like just a monolith, but it's got a very, very attractive skin in that sense. OMAs, Oslo and Coconut Grove, Cesar Peli in a place called Surfside. And it isn't just the condos. This is Frank Gehry's New World Symphony building. Everything that you usually think of being Gehry asked is actually inside the building. And the wall on the left is called the projection wall, and it's a very small orchestral academy. There's only 750 seats. So when they're having their practices, their rehearsals, they can be projected on the outside for a broader audience. This amazing parking structure by Herzog and Dameron, which has actually turned into a kind of community space for events. And of course my favorite project, the one I worked on, the Herzog and Dameron Design Museum, renamed the Paris Art Museum, and I think it really shows how talented they are. What does all this mean? I think a couple of things are at play here. One is I think the developers realized, there used to be a certain formula which had to do with the size of the building, its location on the waterfront, and a few other factors. More and more, especially for instance, Zaha's building, Zaha's building is not on the water. It's on a park that overlooks the water, but it hasn't got that cachet. And without that kind of cachet, a lot of Miami developers were producing the same product everywhere. And all they could do is sort of come up with different names. And I do believe that has been the thing that really caused Miami to look outward. And I think with some pretty good commercial success. I think another aspect is that as the public architecture, like the areas, building, like the museums, improve the taste for good architecture is actually expanded. And I think finally this last blast of towers were made not for retirement so much as targeting very wealthy people from the United States but also around the world. And I think that the lack of, shall we say, the typical Miami developer project was lacking in a certain kind of cachet that they were looking for. Now I can't, it would take such a long time to illustrate what's been going on in the design district, but it's this roughly four blocks with a pedestrian axis running north-south to you. And the number of artists working there, Aranda Lash, Clavel Arquitectos, Sifu Jumoto, Borque Si, Salah Witt, Iwamoto Scott, Ten Architects Shows, Buru Lech Brothers, Zaha Deed, Buck, Mr. Fowler, Leong Leong, Mark Newsom, Aranda and Gallegos, Konstantin Grichich, ourselves, KR, MOS, Patrick, Patricia Urquiola, John Bandosart, sorry, as Johnston Markley is just really, really incredible. And I'm going to encourage you to go to their websites, either the design district's website or to look at the individual sites. So I think it's my time to let other people show and tell. And the first duo is going to be Gustavo Baronbloom and Claudia Bush. They're founding principals at Baronbloom Bush, architects in Miami, and graduates of the Advanced Architectural Design Program at the GSAT-ATP. They're recognized as design leaders in maritime transportation architecture, having planned and designed cruise terminals in U.S., Europe, Central America, Japan, and China. The firm's practice also extends to education, corporate hospitality, residential, interior design, and master planning. They have worked on projects with Herzegovina Mjoln, Zaha Deed, Bernard Schumme, in addition to their practice, Claudia teaches architecture at FIU, Florida International University, where she holds the position of senior instructor at the College of Architecture and the Arts. And Gustavo serves as co-chair of FIU's dean's leadership advisory group. I want to thank Amad and Ria, here with his sexy image, for inviting us and bringing us home. We wanted to bring some sun here, because we flew in yesterday from Miami. And we graduated a long time from Miami. We went here in New York, and we went to Miami, and it was quite a shock at the beginning. So something of that, you certainly experienced there. Maybe most of you guys who were born in the 90s do not remember this image. This is kind of foreign to you, but this was called Miami Vice in the 80s, and it was a series that ran for many years. And I think this captured the imagination and coalesced this image of Miami as a beautiful people, tan, showing their bodies, smiling, happy, with the seagulls and the sea behind. And even though I want to think that we've become a little bit more sophisticated and elegant, if you scratch a little bit the surface, this is still what you get. So this is the view from Miami, Miami Beach. It's an incredible, exuberant place, surrounded by the Caribbean, the water. You wonder what is Miami's identity. It's probably half Cuban, a quarter Brazilian, a six American. And all of this, depending where you drive, where you are at any given moment, this thing is ever changing. You are finding yourself submerged or immersed into these different cultures, which are being made and questioned as we speak. It's an evolving question, what is Miami? And what is the limit of the U.S.? Where the U.S. starts? Many people think that the U.S. finishes in Fort Lauderdale. This is not the way that's done. We think it's the future of the U.S. If we can resolve the question of Miami, we are resolving bigger questions for what America should be. And so I'll leave it at that, and maybe that's for another conversation. But if you look at a map of Miami, and it's on our side of the image, it's water, and you see the development that occurs that is here in this kind of fuchsia color, identified, has been happening in the coast, mostly. And lately it has been moving inland. But Terry was talking about the design district for a second in this last image that he showed, and maybe Claudia can show you where that is in the map of Miami. We are going to show you today, actually, a couple of projects in Winwood and one in downtown. I know that the poster set did work, but we're going to show you more projects that are in the making for this short presentation. So we're going to focus first on the project in Winwood. Winwood actually was an area that was taken by Tony Goldman here from the U.S., and it's low-lying, surrounded by warehouses. And Tony came here from New York, bought a bunch of artist studios and warehouses, and started transforming the facade of these places. And we were given a project, which is a massive project for the area, completely out of scale with the surrounding, because it's like a 250,000 square feet. So we had to deal with this big scale, in this low-scale surrounding. And part of the questioning, part of what we've tried to do is dematerialize this facade front in the street and actually dealing with the surface, which is this one millimeter of surface that is the facade that fronts Fifth Avenue and 25th Street. So, right, because actually, unfortunately, one of our slides is missing, but all of the area here in Winwood, all these warehouses, if you look, were transformed using graffiti into a totally new neighborhood. Actually, if you hashtag Winwood, that 2.5 million hashtags, so people has become the new tourist center of Miami, where people go to see these morals, and it has been centralized now, there are restaurants and bars like that. So this idea of transforming the facade, we also used and incorporated in our design. So this is Winwood. Terry was talking about design district. It's important to note that this is kind of like Williamsburg and then you have whatever, Dumbo and other areas, and these are being developed as we speak in parallel, right? This project, again, it's very large and includes a hotel, includes an academy for beauty product company and include offices and so forth. And it's on the works now to be completed very soon. Again, we sent another presentation that I think it didn't come to this one, so you're going to see a mix of images like this one that we have corrected. So you'll see it on the presentation. It doesn't matter. It's good that we're home. Maybe that's the question, you know? So one of the amazing things of Miami is the subtropical landscape. I mean the nature and the sun. So it is something that we have and that we like to work with. Two blocks away from the piece of land that a developer came and asked us to do a retail project. And we were wondering how do we take this massive lot, create this outdoor mall infusing with vegetation and actually building all with containers. And so this is a project that is basically based on the container module and that it takes a shape, a very industrial that we think is in keeping with Windwood. So the idea was to create a landscape using the containers and then to cover it all with one roof to create one unified park and then we called it Mana Park. I think Bernard will be proud of us. So every sort of in-between spaces that is created between the roof and the containers to create an outdoor experience. So it's interesting because we start with the module of the container and then by multiplication, addition and juxtaposition of these elements that is very industrial, how do we occupy space, make it viable for humans and retail and a vibrant space for the inside. And this is being built as we speak with these, again, sexy images of Miami, Miami Ames. And the first project we wanted to show you today ties back to Terry and the Palm Museum. It's also one of our favorite buildings in Miami. It's a beautiful place and we were very fortunate to be asked by the operator of Food and Beverage to create an outdoor bar on the terrace. So the terrace is actually covered by this roof and also by the volumes. It's open, it's faces the water, it's windy. It's a beautiful place. So we created, with the idea we started that we wanted an object in there. We didn't want to compete with the architecture but sort of like a flying back in this beautiful outdoor terrace. They also asked us that this bar had to be removable in case hurricane is coming or they have other events. So we started with the idea of first analyzing what is the typical bar. So we had, you know, like a counter. Then we created an advanced design by creating this idea of being this one sort of whole, sort of more like an egg, and then with a shell for protection. This had to be designed also to function completely as a bar with everything, with equipment and so like, you know, this highly complex. And then we came to, it had to be modulated. So also in order during hurricane, it can be moved inside the restaurant. And it took us a lot of time to actually design that, what has worked. And we, initially we started working, actually using 3D printer. And then we thought, okay, how do we build it? That was a big challenge for us. There was no technology. Do you know, this is typical interesting for architects, no? We saw this idea and then we say, how the hell do we do this, right? And so we ended up linking it with MXVD in Amsterdam. They had this amazing technology of printing in stainless steel. So they actually invented it. I mean, it's amazing. They put, they used to have robotic arms. They're welding the steel. And as the steel is welded, they're creating this 3D printed lines. And it's in the Netherlands. We found them over the internet. Thanks for that. Gave them a call, e-mail, I said, okay, we're interested and we could collaborate. So this is also a new change in Miami that it has, you know, the collaboration internationally. Because before, you know, there's nobody who could fabricate anything. Actually, you have brave people who trusted us, right? Because we had no idea how to make this thing. But look at the skin, right? How it's perfect. This by hand would have been impossible, right? The algorithm to calculate this thing and that every piece that can be placed together and look like one element is fascinating. And it's always touched and finished by hand. Here is a model. If you can see, this is one of the pieces, right? That composes this huge shell. And so this is in Amsterdam before being shipped. We had to travel there a few times. And this is a short video of the making of the piece. And it's starting again when it came to Miami. Or we can get to Miami. Yeah, yeah, we left, you know, conveniently. The interesting thing, actually, we were tested right away. And they installed the whole thing in three hours. You know, it was all prefabricated, installed it. And then this is Hurricane Ilma came and then the chef from the restaurant sent us this picture, so it worked. And then a few sexy images, of course. And then you are happy in the sunshine now in Miami. Mende Randa is a family partner. And Joarkeen, hold me. Sorry about saying your name wrong. Is a senior architect at Aranda Lash, a New York and Tucson-based design studio that designs buildings, installations, and furniture. Benjamin is also a graduate of the MR program at GSAPP, where he stood out as a great student in my class on mes. He has, Aranda Lash has received the United States Artist Award, Young Architects Award, Design Vanguard Award, AD Innovators, and the Architecturally Emerging Forces Award. Their early projects are subject to the book Tooling. Aranda Lash has also exhibited internationally in galleries, museums, design fairs, and biennials. Their work is a part of the permanent collection of Museum of Modern Art in New York. And they are now ready to show us their work. It's a real pleasure to be here. No description of our studio would be complete without paying respects to the city of Miami. We were in New York and Tucson, but all of our formative work really got tested out in the city of Miami. We have had a relationship with Design Miami and with the Design District, and we're going to show some of those projects. But I just wanted to say that we are really indebted to the people and organizations that have worked with them for years in Miami. And we thought, as a sort of paid respect, we would show you how we grew as practice over 10 years, in 10 minutes, with Miami and with Miami's help and the enlightened citizens of Miami that supported us along the way. So we showed... Our early work was shown in a gallery that showed in Miami, in Design Miami. And this was like right at the beginning of the whole kind of art Basel thing, 2007 and 2008. And we were making work, you see. And part of our, as luck would have it, our first sale of furniture was this cabinet. And this is a key actor in our story. This cabinet was sold to Craig Robbins, who is the developer that Terry mentioned. And the cabinet is... You can see it's about how this logic turns a corner and specifically how it turns this 90-degree corner. That's what we were interested in. And when it came time for Craig Robbins to select architects for this development he was working on, he had this cabinet in his kitchen. And we were lucky enough to get a call. So we thought we would think about that, but what is this cabinet about and how we can use that story to explain just four projects really quickly for Miami. So these four projects that we're going to go over can be reduced to a couple of elements. First on the right over there is the event space. One of the first projects we did there and it can be reduced to two slabs. The one second from the right is our deco project. It's really about a corner. The one second from the left is a second event space and it's really about a ceiling. And the last on the left here is a store we just finished and it's really about some years. So the event space is essentially about two slabs, the sandwich, the programmatic functions. It's a multifunctional space. It's perched up above the south plaza of the design district. It required a lot of flexibility in being in an event space and with all the code constraints and the client requirements it really focused our energy to design these two slabs. We quickly learned that Miami is very familiar with building in concrete. Its engineers and builders really allowed us to have a really large canopy and this canopy really provided a canvas for us to act on. And when we decided to act on this canvas we really looked back at Miami's history and were really inspired by the tropical modernism of Miami. So we decided to use a form liner to really decorate these slabs. We managed with a really simple form liner that was almost free in terms of the cost that it came in. We managed to make two tiles that rotated, really created a nod to this era of trust on modernism in Miami but it had a twist that was around. The second project we call Ardeco and it's really about a corner. Again we looked back at Miami's history. In this case it was more of the Ardeco of the 20s to the 40s. We were inspired by the pleats in the Ardeco architecture and fashion. We really gave the facade the pleats to bring back the ornament of Miami's Golden Era. The facade was made... One of the trickiest things when we started to use these pleats was to go around the corner. It was one of the more challenging parts of the design and construction but we really liked it. We really think that that actually came out to be one of the most successful parts of the building. The facade is made with GRC panels. We find them in an area. We find this company in Texas that made the GRC mostly for traditional buildings like cornices and stuff like that. We managed to document to casting these panels and they used a really, really long form where they would spray the panels and basically dam the form in different ways to create the different panels of the building. Once it was inside it went up really quick. Our intention was to kind of hide the seams so we could read the single surface and not really read the seams. We did that through scattering some of the seams and also inserting this new seam, this new slot which became the lighting feature. The lighting we collaborated with Spirit Major and it has this very slow pulsating feel that really animates it. We've been back a bunch of times having other projects in Miami and having a lot of work on there. Every time we go down there we're really amazed by how the cleats interact with the really strong and warm Miami sun and it really gives this extraordinary depth to a very thin facade. This is the second event space we did in Miami. This one is actually on the north of Plaza of the Design District and it really, again it had to be super flexible, super open. So we really focused again on the ceiling in this case. The ceiling is a series of folded planes and the planes kind of as they move up and down they compress and decompress the space and move through it to give it a more unique character to the space. The event space is connected to the rest of the Design District through this anti-chamber that's super dark and it kind of provides a relief as you come out into this very airy, very bright space. Between every fold there are these troughs that hide all the mechanical equipment and all the hoisting equipment for the different spaces, for the different events and they have to like hide the entrances of the vent. The West facade is completely operable and it opens up to this lush landscape designed by IPC. The sense of the mature trees and the lush landscape really makes you forget that you are in the third floor of an urban building. So over time we worked on these projects. We developed relationships down there. We show at this gallery called the Nina Johnson Gallery. I actually think her program is one of the most exciting in the country right now for up and coming artists and work. The galleries down there and the culture in general is quite open to design and positioning it next to art, sometimes to add art. This is the last product we showed really quickly but the whole presentation from the cabinet to these event spaces and the Art Deco project it's all about veneers if you will and that's what we've learned from Miami. It's like how do you make something solid out of something thin if you will. It's always about how you wrap a corner how you really deal with this small space that the developer gives you on the edge of the building. And even this project, this is a store that we collaborated with BVA with Gustavo and Claudia here in Val Harbor in Miami. It's also about veneers. It's for an Italian fashion brand. They're from Milan. They value their history. And so we looked at these prototypical spaces in Milan as entryways of pilates mainly and really extracted this idea for how to deliver and represent this brand, this store in Miami. And it's through a lot of these surfaces that their kind of material richness comes out. It's, Balextra is, it's amazing leather goods. They're highly refined sophisticated materials. They're very understated in their brand. You don't see any logos or names on there. Even the stitching is very minimal. And so within this understatement we decided to really create like a maximum material effect around all that. And that material would all be milling needs. It would all be this palazzo material, the marbles, the stone on the facade and the ground is a typical street stone from Milan. And the back wall is this Italian Sotsas veneer, the Alpi wood veneer. One distinctive moment is this 30 foot long coil that essentially organizes all the leather goods. And this project is kind of our last project and what we think is maybe how much or how far you can go with something. So that was our presentation. Thank you. Dominic Leong is a founding partner of the studio with Leong Leong. He is an assistant adjunct professor at the GSATP and a graduate of the school's advanced architectural design program. Leong has completed a wide variety of projects including the design of the U.S. Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2018. And he was previously the recipient of the architectural lead prize. Dominic has also received recognition for his work that includes grants from Grand Foundation and the New York State Council on the arts. Dominic. I mean, in the same way that Ben talked about, my answer could be formative for our practice too. We're working on a project in Miami, a parking garage called City View Garage from the Miami Design District. We also feel a lot of gratitude to have this opportunity to practice. So I think it's a very commendable role for the people involved in the design district to really push young architects. So it's, I think the slide that Terry showed highlighted the other garage. And I guess we bookend that. So it's this black bar that sits right off the highway. And as everyone knows, the parking garage in Miami sort of translates the infrastructure of parking into spectacle. And we are fortunate to stab at that. And again, it is literally like looking here with this thinness. I think what's fascinating about the design district is the transformation of the image of the district through this kind of firmness. And so in this particular case, we were commissioned by a DACRA developer, run by Craig Roms. And it's more or less an exquisite corpse. They asked two architects to design two thirds of the facade. And in the middle is actually John Balasari piece, which is hard to tell. And then Eumota Scott's on the right, and then we're on the left. And in a way, it's a pretty simple project. It's like how do you skim this infrastructure and make it kind of an urban icon that animates itself from the scale of the highway but also from the neighborhood. So we were interested in that kind of scale shift. And so how can we kind of generate some sort of skin that creates a kind of atmospheric effect at the scale of the car and the highway? We were really kind of inspired. Gustavo talked about the sort of atmosphere of Miami. So these kind of patterns of like water, shimmer, or the kind of texture of palm trees taken almost very superficially. But in a lot of ways, I don't think you always need complex ideas. It's more about how you execute them. So in a way, it's how do we take this kind of ephemera of the atmosphere and translate it into a very executable skin design. So we more or less reduced the complexity of this texture, kind of water pattern down to like a series of shapes that created this pattern. And then the desire to kind of create some depth within this thinness, essentially, that 2D pattern gets kind of folded up into like a 3D pattern. And so from a distance, it's gold because it's Miami. We actually wanted to make it like super shiny, like mirror polish, to present that to the client. And they said, that's crazy because someone's going to be driving the car. They're going to crash. They're going to sue us. And then we're going to sue you. So we said, okay, that's totally fine. We can make it less shiny. But we still get these texts from different people who are driving by and trying to kind of capture the glimmering effect. So I think it was successful in that regard. So yeah, I mean, it's animated at these different scales from the scale of the car down to the scale of the neighborhood, the sidewalk. And so what we really liked was how it actually gained a kind of texture or kind of roughness, almost a kind of organic crested quality to it, like bark in a way. The manufacturing or the fabrication process was pretty simple. Essentially flat packed stainless steel panels with the gold titanium coating on one side. So all the panels basically showed up in this crate. And then on-site they were essentially bent to create the dimensionality in the other direction. And it just so happened. It wasn't really intentional, but the fins or the tabs actually work as like mini struts and they stick from the panel. So it prevents kind of oil canning in the panel. And then you get this kind of like flip-flopping on one side that's kind of lost in steel or something. Gold, so depending on your vantage points, it's kind of animated. As you move around the building. And then the inside is essentially becomes a kind of like cascade of shadows. And I mean one of the few kind of logistical requirements was maintaining a 50% coralsky. So it was an actual airflow. And also a lot of hurricane testing, which... And then sort of at the scale of the kind of individual aperture you kind of get these views back and see. That's it. Excuse me, Hillary Sample is an associate professor at J-S-A-P-P and a founder partner of M.O.S. Architects. M.O.S. was the recipient of the 2015 Cooper Ewood Smithsonian Design... That's a long one. Smithsonian... Let me say that again. Recipient of the 2015 Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum National Design Award in architecture. The 2010 American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award and the 2008 Architectural League of New York Emerging Voices Award. The firm has written numerous publications surveying their work and Hillary's design research on architecture and health has also been published in the books in Perfect Health, Canadian Center for Architecture, Lars Miller, 2012, and Maintenance Architecture, MIT Proust 2016. We're going to go through a lot of slides today. I think the project we were providing to do for the design district, it's very small, probably the smallest one here of the group. It's basically three feet wide and a very small space to think about designing. It's more about setting the tone for the project and going through a series of things along the way. This is a project that we worked on for about five years. Actually, it came in and out of the studio, stopping and starting. We were constantly reminded of Miami throughout all of its other projects we've worked on. Interestingly enough, a former student of mine, Kurt Evans, invited us to work on the project. The last studio I talked him in was a studio that went to Montreal in February. I think it's fitting that he invited us to do something in Miami. For those of you who know our work a little bit, we're always working on software in relation to making buildings and objects. This is a proposal for something in Detroit. We're also always working on projects that are remote from us in a way. How to try to establish some sort of design ideas and relationship through our work but also through potential placemaking. This is the same thing we did for Venice. Looking at some similar things that, again, this is done after we've been working on Miami. Things like software, looking at shapes in the computer and processing, applying certain elements to it, and then we're working on a new project. We're working on things like square windows. Already in our body of work, we are trying to work always with the same sort of elements over and over again, kind of working on things and playing with representation, making our books, thinking about funny objects that we would really like to design but are embarrassing to say when you design a subject candle. Working at the scale of, let's say, seating, vases, soap, with furniture, another sort of soap dish, funny hooks, a shared bench, rocks, things like this. We're also looking also at architect's drawings. We've done a whole series on the figure as well as, in this case, model furniture as we have the next project we have going on, but we're looking at the sort of incompleteness of that and then designing furniture around that through metal. We do a lot of work with metal. And so, you know, just in the context of constantly working at different sizes, all relatively still small scale, everyone else here today is doing much bigger buildings than we are, and how to reinforce a practice that is engaged at a certain scale. We're wanting to keep the office in a way at that particular scale, so to reinvent the idea of a glass block, something that then is just connected very loosely but through the design of the block. And I think for us always being reminded of Miami coming in and out of the office that interesting relationship to design that architecture has that maybe it doesn't happen, I think, here in New York to the degree that it does in a place like Miami or maybe a place also like, let's say, Mexico City, which I just got back from with my students and have been taking them there to look at housing. We have a radio designing benches and jackets, designing an instruction manual in the form of a book with figures and stickers. And, you know, just sort of setting ideas around where design and its intersection with architecture can come into play, a souvenir show that's sort of critiquing also the American house and this is a proposal for a house for a small, kind of small scale house. So, again, always like trying to think about design and materials in relation to the small scale and to materials. And so, in the case of Miami then, as you can see it's a really small project. At the time there's no client, sorry, there's no tenant, so we don't really even know what you're going to be looking at. But through the process of writing software applying these forces to produce a way into, there's the building to give you some idea for the form. The facade is Dan B. Marble. It's actually from Vermont. And it's, so it's much more durable and kind of interesting maintenance how to play that out through the practice without overtly stating that. And then simply freezing the windows. There's 24 windows and doors. They're all treated the same, same size. It's roughly seven feet, which is typically the window size we're using in some of the house projects. It's recessed. I think that's sort of one big move that everything is recessed as far back as we could possibly go. And then along the side you can see some of the holes, which is where the lighting is. So also during that time working on Galway Chamber where we get experimented with materials thinking about marble. And this way then we started to overlay the idea of milling and representation of lines in materials to thinking about form that we don't have. Let's say in that project also, but always thinking about this idea of how deep something is, how to push more depth if possible. So anyway, I'll sort of end there, but just to say that the, you know, Miami in this sort of five year period, especially of moving and coming to New York, that we've been thinking about that in the context of all of the other projects. And maybe the work doesn't necessarily reflect the Miami vibe, but that project has been very important for us in thinking about the work in general. Dan Wood is a former employee of KR at the top of his resume. I think he was an intern before that. Since those days he has co-founded work AC with Dean Amal Andreos as well as being an adjunct associate professor at GSAPT and a graduate of the school's MR program. He leads international projects for work AC, ranging from master plans to buildings across the U.S. as well as in Asia, Africa and Europe. Wood held the 2013, 2014 Louis I. Concher, Yale School of Architecture and has taught at Princeton Cooper Union and UC Berkeley, where he was the Freedom Distinguished Chair. Work AC was recently named the AIA New York State's Firm of the Year and has achieved international claim for projects such as the master plan for the New Holland Island Cultural Center in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Wheaton Kennedy offices in New York and the Edible School Yard which was the first one 2016 in Brooklyn. Alright, hi everybody. Last one, here we go. I came of age in the 1980s and in 2016, Josh Jordan and I ran a studio at Penn, which is another school and we decided to look at Miami and what was fascinating for us was to discover that I came of age in the 1980s but Miami also came of age in the 1980s and I think there are not many cities in the world that you could say that about and I think it's a kind of fascinating thing that we will be studying for centuries to come like the, you know, if Miami had metagies they would be ensconced in pink and so just to give a sense of why Miami came of age in the 1980s so these buildings, these Art Deco buildings that everyone knows from the 1930s were actually nothing special when they were built, no one loved them for many years, went into disrepair until the late 1970s they were kind of rediscovered kind of saved from demolition and really became the emblematic icons of Miami that they are now so even though they are from the 30s in the 1980s there are many charts that my students found that look like this where basically everything is kind of going on fine until 1980 and so Cuban immigration, the boat the famous boat people all happened throughout the 1980s South American banks got nervous about being based in South America and decided to move to somewhere closer to the US so they moved to Miami in the 1980s of wide use around the 1980s and the cocaine trade was centered in Miami during the 1980s there were a string of seven number one hits by a band called Miami Sound Machine the Miami Dolphins had their best seasons and both universities also had incredible sports seasons throughout the 1980s and the number one television show as we've already seen in the United States was Miami glass so it's a kind of amazing combination and I think the 80s are a funny decade to make fun of Miami Vice in fact opened its montage every season this changed actually there was only one season there was always pink every year the color was different behind but it was never beige and the opening montage featured this building by architectonica which was a firm that also was founded in the 1980s and actually became a dramatic architectural embodiment of everything that was Miami and exciting in that period in this building was really you know part of the Don Johnson's name appeared I think over this building in the opening montage I think what is interesting though about this is the 80s is a very shallow decade in some ways it's about pop culture and it's really the beginning of the shallowness that I live with today but at the same time there was a lot going on there I think these buildings also are a bit caricature risk but certainly different than the postmodern buildings that were happening at the same time in architecture and I think for me this is architectonica's best building it's the battle long which is also about to be torn down hopefully not being torn down it got the protection it's an amazing building I mean you can see it's the facade of this kind of corbusian apartment building behind a really beautiful project and I think for me these kind of projects always reminded me of other work of the 1980s you know not Miami Vice but really the kind of intellectual postmodernism of O.M. Unger's or Satsas and the Memphis group so for me the result of the research project was just to discover all this kind of coming together coming of age of Miami in the 1980s but also this theme which you have seen in basically every presentation which is that what on the surface in Miami looks shallow and you know surface deep actually has a kind of incredible depth a non-U.S. sophistication kind of behind it and I think this research was an after our design for the Miami garage but that is the kind of theme of our project as well it's a kind of seemingly shallow project with surprising depth which I think you could say about many things so I thought Terry was going to present his project so we I'm actually not presenting a full project we are only one fifth of a project which is also a parking garage on this side in Miami and it is not our project this is Terry Riley's project he basically had the idea to invite five architects to tell them I guess we were told who each other were but we weren't told we were told not to tell anyone else what we were doing and to design one fifth of a parking garage facade and then we would be kind of randomly put together so and I'll show some images of that in a second but our one fifth is here as Hillary mentioned in Miami you are given three feet to work with that is the official Miami dimension so they said that we could project our facade in or out three feet I think in the end we were given three feet six in or out of the surface of the building and so we thought well that's it's already a shallow place to work a shallow project as a parking garage because in the future hopefully we're not parking so much and that's a very shallow depth so we said let's do the deepest possible program at least within our three feet we proposed to put everything from an auditorium to a park to a children's playground to a lending library, a DJ booth a kind of water collection system pet stations, electric car charging places, an art gallery a kind of sculpture gallery, a painting gallery along with it places to sit to put as much circulation on the facade as possible to just kind of stuff it with as much stuff to make Miami to kind of create a vertical city in a way, a kind of city that Miami wants to be or is a secret, let's say we did a bunch of tests of what this could look like and eventually came up with the idea of a kind of ant farm so that all of this activity would be either displayed or concealed at different moments to kind of create this also visual representation of this kind of verticalization of activity and life throughout this very thin building and this is what the model looked like, we have the problem in our office of making models that look exactly like the building so it will be no surprise what the building looks like so this is the kind of outside of it with this carbon and inside you have all these different spaces and activities so that's what we would design and then we were told what site we had and who was next to us so that we secretly worked with Juergen Mayer and realized that he had a kind of similar finger scheme at the corner and I think corners are I guess another theme of today and the theme of 500 years of architecture but so we worked together to make our fingers interact in an interesting way at the corner and so this is our facade interacting with Juergens as you turn the corner it gets crazy over there but pretty interesting it's Instagram and here are some images of our project so we did take Johnson's famous t-shirt as our color weight for the interior here you can see the four feet, three and a half feet that we were given and some of the different images so in a way all this different stuff behind we thought if we just paint it all pink it will create a kind of coherence inside so you have this kind of pink zone on the inside there's kids playground under construction the auditorium at the top you can see the DJ booth at the top what's amazing is that because the cars need to breathe Miami hates parking garages but they build lots of them and so the city is kind of always telling you you have to cover parking garages but then they're also saying you have to make them completely transparent because to get the fumes out so it was great to work with perforated metal on this it actually completely transforms and at night you don't read the kind of ant farm façade but you actually read the deeper part of the ant farm all the way back to the parking garage one of the highlights of my professional career would be going down to the building department to try to explain the project just for the record so you see there's Jurgen Maier French artist Nicolas Bouff who does set design for the Paris Opera lots of 2D work and he's fascinated by Rococo architecture and manga so it's a kind of mashup this is Clavel Rojo's facade it's called Urban Jam it's car bodies it's a facade the donor to the museum across the street is a car dealer so it's silver and gold cars and this at the end is ours and it's you know Miami's under construction all the time there's a company called Bob's Barricades and they provide all the yellow, the orange and white striped stuff so there's nothing in this homage to Bob's Barricades so I remember the time I'm in the building department explaining that there's a children's playground there's an art gallery and what else a library and they're also like you have to have a mixed use permit this can have to be a place of assembly how many people are you going to have a auditorium so a massive re-labeling now what you can't see in this picture is these 24 foot curiatives with little manga faces they're holding the entrance to the garage it took about two months but every inspector in the building department knows how to say curiatives so anyway are you all going to come up here to sit I'd like to tease out a thread that Bob did in a couple of presentations the mention of Tony Goldman Tony Goldman was a real estate developer he passed away a couple of years ago and he has his roots in Soho actually initially Philadelphia I don't know which neighborhood but then Soho and then Wynwood and he had a very clear vision you buy up cheap properties in run down neighborhoods that have certain assets and you then do little things to make it cool attractive then there's a moment where it all starts to work and it's not you investing all your money it's all these other people coming in buying your property next door renovating it so on and so forth this got repeated in like I said Soho South Beach Wynwood and correct us it in the design district more construction but it's also because he has a very substantial partner there he always intended to be the design district where it would be furniture shops and so on he got approached by LVMH looking for that sort of an arrangement almost like what's the place rodeo drive where it's not really a mall walking space so that's sort of interesting if anybody has any recollections of him that would be interesting to hear South Beach South Beach was always a cheap American destination it was family those unbelievably inexpensive little concrete boxes it was never a luxury it was never upscale that lent to its decline in the end it wasn't fun enough to maintain its attractiveness and the cruise ship line business was beginning to put the motels out of business so there's another link in these things and I guess there's many other links but I wanted to correct somebody gave a demographic and more than half of my Indians are Latin but only half of them are Cuban okay Venezuelans Hondurans make up the rest blacks I think make up 10% 15% of the population and the rest are called Anglos so if you're from Poland you're an Anglo if you're from Samoa and it has a very curious flavor like that I mean it's a little bit Beirut there's just like these major distinctions of pockets of population I don't have any questions to start off with, are there any observations? I think that Dave County is probably in the US and he judged upon the statistics he's the one that has the highest concentration of foreign war something like that it's like 90% and when you do business in Miami it's very funny because you're thrown into a room with 600 people and the language might be Spanish nobody asks the guy sitting on the left on the right if he knows Spanish they just talk so you can be very intimidating you know to do business there because it's very foreign but at the same time it's very eerie it is a neighborhood thing and how people get to the United States get to Miami will also color your perception of them when I was the director of the Miami Art Museum I was surprised and I brought up to the board that none of our materials were bilingual and the heavy hitting Latin trustees said we don't want them to be bilingual everybody should learn English and this conversation would not take place in Texas it would not take place in California but so yes a lot of them were refugees a lot of them came here to study and they're very proud of their ability to speak both languages and they weren't simply not that interested in having bilingual material what's the first time you went to Florida? I went my freshman year of college I drove down with a friend of mine we drove all night long we were so tired we hit Fort Lauderdale we were kind of delirious from tiredness and I guess driving a little bad we got pulled over by police they said we're not going to give you a ticket but you have to leave Dade County or Broward County and never come back and so they kicked us out of Broward County so then we went down to Dade County and fell asleep on a beach but you were did you have any architectural vision? no I did see I saw Morris Day perform jungle love no architectural vision no I I guess what I'm trying to get to is who has an actual rolling memory of what I saw at that time and what I did later I went I remember the Brickel building was very I went there to grow crew the next year and we would run past that building and everybody there it wasn't me the whole on Brickel Brickel I know that's when post-marginism was you know that's when Phil Johnson was on the cover of Time Magazine I mean we got there in the early 90s to Miami and I sort of thought there was a huge contrast coming from New York also me being German and I remember here at Columbia we had all this discussion what is real you know what's the reality and I came to Miami I said this is the future because this is not real and I was actually fascinated I thought you know wow we got there because now we got a job with the architecture there were opportunities we really felt that and it took just really long really long and Miami changed and or maybe the world changed I don't know so the two things come together and it's amazing all these projects are coming up and also sort of the character of those projects you know I actually think that all the projects you showed from Miami I mean that we are you know all the Fritzke Weiss winner built there and I think they built amazing projects and also that what is going on with the design district well it's why there are so many cars it's because Miami is a city of cars we all drive but there is a great energy in it and it it's changing in a really interesting way and in a contemporary way you know I remember asking Sacha because Sacha chose to have her place be Miami she couldn't have lived anywhere and actually when she was not in lunch Miami was her place so it's strange suddenly you choose this place it was not that she was seeking work here she liked to hang out I think she was escaping from her office by coming to Miami staying at the which one and then the other architects we had the same kind of feel for Miami Beach in the you know the grittier moments were her talking to me on it and they used to come here from Jacques and his wife used to come here to hang out you know and it's odd that they both wound up being major contributors without actually intending to be well and Ram and Lorenzo Speer did a project together with Miami before the pink house I'm sorry Ram Ram and Lorenzo Speer did a project for her parents and that now the pink house there's two distinct designs the pink house was built I believe in I can't remember when but it is bright pink and it's right on the day right and I don't know what Christo would say if you asked him where'd you get the idea of the color pink because all those islands are within sight of the house yeah that's true I think he mentioned the color of the water that he wanted to do the contrast to the yeah Christo that's why he chose pink I just came back from Miami and released Spelter and Hot but I did see the design district and I was really impressed with all these colors the part of the project that you did was very very inspiring what would you say is missing the design district well there's a jean gang tower that didn't happen that's just a personal preference I think quite frankly did you take a taxi from the design district to the airport no I didn't well the design district is five minutes from the airport and it's five minutes to South Beach I would think it would be an interesting place to stay for business or holiday or whatever and a few more restaurants I think hospitality hospitality because all the luxury stores and art galleries and amazing objects and architecture it seems something is missing after ours today's they're planning out a whole phase to fill it in with life with restaurants and other cafes I mean it's still growing into issues I have to say I was kind of struck by all our presentations this theme of kind of relinquishing to of Miami whether it's the warm sun or the three foot which by the way we got two feet sorry we got like 12 inches I know every building gets a kind of or every developer we put one millimeter but there seem to be this theme of of accepting what you're given and making the most of it down there I mean I definitely feel like we've learned from that ethic into all our other projects so it almost seems like every project you're doing is about making the most of what a client or developer might give you but I feel like at least today that theme it's now found rather start with can I ask a follow up question on that do you think this coping thing that you're talking about has something to do with the environment you know with the water on all sides and this like sort of ticking time bomb well here I'll give you a little right now you know we now have a farm based building code done by new urbanist our former new urbanist dean and I'm trying to remember the work started in 2000 I think took five years to ratify it it has now one word about climate change and maybe in 2005 that's a little understandable the other thing the other document is city's preservation policy and it makes no distinction of whether a property is on a site that's technically below water or will be soon you know no hydro what's that when you map the water map of water areas over of it and we have a state building code that was adopted by the sea or one of these national codes it has a bigger section on snow loads than it does on rising water it is being taken seriously in discussions among bankers insurers property holders and so on and so forth I think that progress has to be made in how to deal with this once this insurance companies start turning down policies or raising them to sustainable rates you're in trouble now the entire county is not all at risk a big part of the state is yeah design is actually high ground no it's interesting to play off that the concentration on the envelope in Miami is not a vanity exercise it's the hurricane laws are so stringent we all had to deal with the I mean they're amazing your building has to pass what's called a missile test which doesn't happen here literally your material has to stop the missile test is a tuba core that they shoot at your material at 120 miles an hour to simulate a palm tree hitting your building and your facade has to withstand that so that's a design constraint that all of us, implicitly we all have to pass missile tests so you wonder why why is attention to just that few inches it's like well that's one reason and the climate is so extreme you really have to mitigate the climate for comfort and now you have the added the added rising water because there's no mandate at a state level for considering sea level rise and things like that in fact certain government agencies have been purported for discussing this legally they cannot talk about it so then it comes down to the municipalities and Miami Beach is trying to make themselves be proactive and so you have villages you have these pockets of things happening but it's within themselves it's not a statewide conversation and therefore it's much more difficult because a city like Miami Beach may or may not have the funds to attack bigger questions but since we are speaking of Miami Beach they are now elevating they understand that the whole city over the next 10-15 years have to elevate 4 feet so if you go there now and you drive one of the main arteries which is West Avenue or the streets of the back you go up and down because any of the new constructions roadways and civil projects are elevated 5 feet and there's a huge issue with that because the retail stores that are on the side of it are sunk and so when we design new buildings in Miami Beach they allow us for example an extra 4 feet of height understanding that if the city ever decides to build up you will be taken whoever the owner is 4 feet of your property so you know these things are ongoing I guess I was curious about the aesthetics you know because I know that there's a lot of conversation but does this kind of living at the edge of disaster you know have an influence not just now but in the history of Miami but the pink the shades of pink and the well now it has because what was mentioned before the hurricane compliance which means that any element that we use to for the design of a facade or a roof or a door or things that is outside on the shell needs to have a hurricane approval and it's very expensive to design your own element to be approved by hurricane because you will bear the brunt of that testing so architects are limited to use what is there in the market most of the time and therefore a lot of the architecture starts to look the same yeah because we have to use what is pre-approved let's say and it's great you know with like architects that you see here today that are trying to break that and incorporate other systems that are far beyond what we normally utilize on a day-to-day basis well I think I mean I don't think it's disaster so much the aesthetics I mean what we did in our research it's fantasy you know it's always associated with fantasy and I think and it's the combination of this fantasy of being at the beach being outside of your normal day-to-day life it was always vacation land Disney you know it's dream land and I think combined with the fact that it's all very new and there is no history to draw on I think you know Art Deco is really a European phenomenon it was the first modern international style but it's not you know it's New York and it's and it's land you know that's where they come out in the U.S. and then the rest of the world so I think you know there's something about that it was always a modern forward-looking city that was you know heavily projecting this idea of the future I would say and this kind of life life that is not in a day-to-day life not a serious life that's what that was yeah I think my going back to the question of all your questions almost kind of generational my first experience in Miami was the design for the art fair and so when I think of Miami I think of interiors which is kind of erotic so in my mind there's like the giant art fair interior tents and then there's the design district which is almost like this weird urban interior as well even though it's outside but it also there's a conversation about development too and these kind of pockets of development that might occur kind of like makes me think of this kind of future archipelago that might involve from where it's at I guess my question is how do you see the development patterns shifting I mean I think the prez is sort of an interesting example right because that's sort of position more inland and you know why I was positioned there do you see things moving obviously more inland what's referred to as the the Biscayne corridor is the growth of the city north from downtown up to further northern reaches and that has received a lot of attention from developers I don't know how these guys get together and decide where they're going to build the next tower but this is not about Miami Beach this is on the Miami side and this is not about any second homes so it's a more familiar development pattern I expect there to be very few empty blocks within the next 15 or 20 years Miami has a huge housing deficit in terms of decent middle class working forced class so yes it does seem to be a lot of it's a big pipeline the other interesting thing about Miami is it's not a sprawl everyone drives but it's not a sprawl it's carried in by the wetlands to the west and the ocean to the east and it's combined with a fairly progressive urban growth boundary which came about in the 1970s and it's still there it's like Oregon and Miami they have urban growth boundaries in the US so I think it's becoming denser and denser and denser the subways never can come the limestown in honor would be interesting to see how this works out what do you think about the tensions between regeneration and education and the fact that some of these new places are becoming very exclusive well you know in Miami the design district has not been gentrified in the sense that no one's really been displaced it was really down at the heels former design area and the same with westwood windwood again very down at the heels empty buildings so I'm trying to think of a neighborhood that is gentrifying in that sense that we use it Miami Beach yes little Haiti yes two big projects right now if you develop this there it's tapping up land they see the future that's going to be the dissonant corridor all the way I was wondering actually I think one of the things that's really interesting is that it's this kind of very weird mix between there is some history there's strong culture it's pretty tribal you have some codes and regulation is very developer driven but at the same time compared to it's succeeded there's a kind of consistency and things are nevertheless within the anarchy yielding something that has a kind of coherence which you don't find in other cities that are just market driven and just so I don't know what all these you were saying like you don't know how they get together on the side so it's so interesting that they would actually get together or like what are these mechanisms of there's one part and the second part has the design district become a model do people call Craig Robbins up say hey we want you to consult we're trying to start up or is it not there yet or you know I think they've got to finish it first I mean there's still stuff in construction and ladies who are in high heels and are shopping for a $5,000 purse don't like construction dirt D what was the first part of the question I'm sure they don't get together they don't share information secrecy is unbelievably important or the one thing that along the lines what you're saying has always kind of puzzled me is if you look at downtown from the causeway from Miami beachside it's got a really nice skyline of course you get the water and then the park and then the skyline and you know it's sort of like how'd they do that but you know it's funny because when we were there 20 years ago you could only design a building that would be yellow or peach and if it was something with a roof it had to have this barrel vault tile so it was like an extension of Coral Gables fast forward 20 years and that has radically changed and I think Art Basel had a lot to do with that another layer is that Latin American countries has gone through this up and down and people who were had their industries in Colombia fed up with the situation there and decided to make this is my theory Miami their home they still have their companies there and the Lutherans but they moved to Miami and these are people from globalized and they expect a different level of services they expect a museum of certain quality they expect a performing arts center they expect banking institutions and they're sophisticated and they've been pushing to develop very fast Miami it's not by chance that you have a pair that's donating this enormous amount of money and likewise other people like that that in 20 years completely transformed the equation but Dallas is the same I mean you have people pushing for an arts district and the performance arts center but don't forget up until some manageable time Cuban stuff they're all going back to Cuba they're not going to build museums in Florida they're not going to build concert halls they thought they were going back to Cuba so that has done a big change but I'm wondering whether the urban growth boundary also helps like create density or where you like in Dallas developers keep going out and out and out so you can never create a sense of compression that's absolutely true I'm saying about the I do go to Seaside which is built by the new awareness like it's a town that was created right in this very specific vernacular but also most places on the Gulf Coast at least in Tampa Bay places like Holiday Florida were created as towns at a time when vacationing became possible for the middle class and Miami really had a pull together at that time too I mean it's like in the town that I grew up in you were either Latin American or you were from Michigan, Pennsylvania or New York and like it really and so there's this thing that happens in Florida where every 30 years when the popular style changes they just pick up literally the store's clothes and they build another one down the street and the interesting thing so I think that because in many ways Miami can't do that and the land is more valuable it's more beautiful because they can't just like move more down the Gulf Coast because of the protected lands of the Everglades because of the desire to stay close to Caribbean and like Gulf sort of islands there is a sense of place there that I think has not necessarily gelled in other cities in Florida specifically but if you look at like Tampa as an example lots of the development in Tampa around like cigar city like the human areas like maintaining those spaces the new buildings that are being built are being built in that vernacular because there is a desire for a sense of community that I think even irrespective of like outside influence there's a desire to keep things sort of looking the same which I think is why everything is peach and pink or yellow or whatever it's the same reason why like when you buy a house and the entire street is all bright colours like even if you wouldn't necessarily choose that for yourself like people sort of they want a sense of community and I think it's because there is so because everyone is sort of far from home they want to create an identity with that place that is specific like my house in Miami has these things whereas like my house in Rhode Island has like a very big different sort of aesthetic and thought and I think that that is kind of how these ideas or these like spaces kind of congeal in like we kind of want this to look like that because we want to maintain this feeling and it is very much like the Disney idea no one who is building in Miami wants the postcard of like welcome to Miami to look different than it does already because it adds to like sort of the value of the like allure of the place and I think that's just sort of a like the vacation understanding of that aesthetic of Florida I would, yeah it's really interesting Well I would just add that there's probably two different kinds of like fantasy land one is like the celebration that the kind of Disney fantasy has you know a high degree of control and regulation and rules to really carry that out I mean certainly celebration you know it's like building in New York whereas you know some of these other I would say developments probably the kind of wilderness aspect of it or wildness has to do with there that there are these kind of rough scenes that people do really I mean I think all of us were really trying to push these regulations that we were dealt with certainly Miami code and the new Miami code you know we were able to do this corner treatment on this building that we showed because we we've maximized our interpretation of one aspect of the code which was the requirement for I mean just real quickly like a visit you had to have visibility around so the new Miami code says you have to have all rounded corners which is kind of crazy so we we said well it's not quite rounded but it does give you visibility and you know it's that it's that interpretation that I think brings in some like that's where architects kind of can step in and put their dream but it's very different from say like celebration or kind of Disney town there's ways you can parse that idea of fantasy I was just going to say I mean I think the one thing that we felt most struck by was just the client's dedication to design and that that's almost unprecedented in a way I was going to say we had free reign over anything and he's very simple materials the design districts well it does but he's kind of personalized his home in New York his home in Miami and he's very serious about it absolutely I think there's a total dedication to that and I just finished my presentation I mean I think that it just shouldn't be under and design is with many definitions to what that is and to the extent of it I think that there is always our experiences at all levels and whoever we dealt with was about reinforcing that degree of detail so I think even across all the presentations you're kind of questioning the surface from one millimeter to the idea of the corner I think those are valuable lessons for students to understand how to engage in something on a small scale even if it takes a little time certainly for the time other parts of the United States and the world have you seen other parts of America attempting that kind of must plan for the design purpose well Rodale Drive just happened to be a street in Beverly Hills where all the fancy luxury brands wrote moved to Beverly Hills I noticed that some time ago they tried to do what looked like a side street off of it but it was extremely stage set looking it felt like you had left the urban core in this instance these are all the original streets they're all the original sidewalk widths for better or for worse most of the buildings was your building from scratch yeah it was we've done two from scratch but a number of these buildings have been redone partially or completely as existing fabric there are a couple of historic buildings there's brick more building he was the pioneer who developed that whole area in the 1920s he figured since he was going to subdivide this place and build houses he should open up a furniture company so that people could fill up their houses with his furniture the yeah I would sorry I just wanted to reinforce this they really didn't know what they were talking about with design and I think it's partly this exposure to an international client base and kind of the art gallery scene there they as a developer and increasingly I think the community at large in Miami is just very aware of what's happening everywhere else we were finding they were more aware than we were here in East Coast what's the best gallery in Antwerp they do they had an opinion about it and I think that idea of having an informed collaborator was critical and yeah I would back that up I've been there's one story about Miami that's for myself like 10 years I've always you have to be careful underestimate it's a town that knows but that also changed and he is people who live in Miami who stay now these global jet setters their collection they live in Miami they change also the nature of architecture I'm from Ecuador the influence of Miami and South America something that's really interesting South Americans see Miami as basically it's the United States when they say we're going to go to the United States they go to Miami and they see the culture of Miami as a completely but that's something so then and it seems like it's always a little bit behind too it's like it's Miami maybe 5 years ago so the the influence of architecture that has come to Miami is actually just starting to hit South America which is very interesting I'm from Ecuador and we just got in Quito we have two York Engels buildings at John DeBell which is never never happened it's the first time a start to this and I really think it's like some of this Miami thing I wanted to thank everyone every time we have an event such as this I'm kind of going to Miami this could be like a whole day discussion of design in cities but also I hope there are some real estate students here I'm not sure so okay great and so thanks everyone it was really interesting thank you especially Terry and I'm going to make sure to get you back soon