|
Arquitectonica.
American architectural firm incorporated in 1977 by Bernardo Fort-Brescia (b Lima, Peru, 19 Nov 1950), Laurinda Hope Spear (b Rochester, MN, 23 Aug 1950), Hervin Romney (b Havana, Cuba, 9 Feb 1941), Andres Duany (b New York, 7 Sept 1949) and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (b Bryn Mawr, PA, 10 Dec 1950). The latter two members of the firm left in 1980 to start their own practice. The firm’s early sketches displayed an interest in the surrealistic place-making of Giorgio de Chirico, which Arquitectonica transformed to exercises in geometric abstraction at the layered and orderly Spear house (1977–8), Miami, FL. In its first decade of practice Arquitectonica transformed speculative housing developments, office buildings and shopping centres—normally banal architectural projects—into dramatic, expressive ‘high tech’ forms marked by flashy, sensual and commercially attractive styling. It single-handedly transformed the Biscayne Bay–Brickell Boulevard skyline in Miami with its Helmsley Palace (1979–80), Babylon (1979–82), the Imperial (1979–83) and especially the witty housing block Atlantis (1980–82), achieving international recognition. Work in other cities included the Horizon Hill Center (1981–2), San Antonio, TX, which echoed the theatrical scale of the Soviet Constructivists’ images of the 1920s, while the Casa Los Andes (1988), Lima, employed freer forms inspired by Matisse collages. At the Rio Shopping Mall (1988–9), Atlanta, GA, Arquitectonica ornamented a brightly coloured corrugated metal skin with elements of structural steel framing, a geodesic dome and, just for fun, a parade of adoring frogs in formation in a pond. Functionalism remained the underlying catalyst informing such later work as the Banco de Credito (1988), La Molina, Lima, whose independent forms for foyer, boardroom, auditorium and cafeteria slice through or slide under the four-storey courtyard block. Arquitectonica adapted the universality of Modernist abstraction to the local climate of time and place, especially in Miami where its chic, late-Modernist buildings reflected both the optimism of the 1980s and the regional colour and festive unconventionality of sub-tropical south Florida.
|
