Rodolphe El-Khoury

This book contains a compilation of the work of Perkins & Will Miami since it’s inception in 1996. Drawing from a legacy of nearly a century of the fabled Chicago architectural Firm, the story of the Miami Studio is one of a search for a regional and critical modernist language unique to its time and place. Starting as a five person office, the studio has grown to a team of 70 architects, interior designers, and landscape professionals who have come together with a single vision of meaning and purpose. The work ranges from one of the most visionary Corporate Headquarters in the country, to a Hospital in Ghana; from the most important new Public Park in Florida to the largest Women’s University in the Middle East; from an Innovation Center in Rio de Janeiro, to an Office Building in Wynwood.

This book presents a privileged insight into the design and construction of the award-winning Thomas P. Murphy Design Studio Building through a series of interviews with the main professionals responsible for its conception, design and construction: the lead architects Bernardo Fort-Brescia, Raymond Fort-Brescia and Thomas Westberg; the builders Thomas C. Murphy, Erin Murphy, Nick Duke and Jason Anderson; the curtain wall manufacturers Jose Daes and Carmen L. Guerrero, and the University of Miami Project Manager, Gary Tarbe. It also offers sumptuous, detailed photography to provide a thorough understanding of a building that is not just a brilliant work of architecture in its own right but that also provides an inspiring, tailor-made environment in which to educate the architects of the future.

The migration of computing from dedicated appliances to physical environments, thanks to increasingly proliferating microchips and ever-expanding information networks directly implicates and empowers architecture as a transformative agent and medium. The fact that objects can now sense, think, act, and communicate with the help of embedded technology is opening up the potential for an architecture that is more closely aligned with the networked dynamics of living systems – a sentient architecture. The technological enhancement of physical matter charts a movement away from a mechanical paradigm towards a biological model. The shift manifests itself on several levels, from the micro scale in the form of new composite or “smart” materials capable of registering and responding to external stimuli, to larger network formations between people, objects, spaces, and landscapes. Radical artifice here serves to imitate nature, enmeshing built environments in a complex web of interactions whose emergent properties approximate the resiliency of natural ecologies. • It is precisely this fine attunement to life that has made these emerging technologies pertinent in dealing with a wide range of issues from the therapeutic benefits to the body, to the mediation of global and climatic energy systems. The projects featured in this book demonstrate in working prototypes architectural applications of synthetic sentience in the broad research area of ambient intelligence, focusing on: Immersive Spaces, Hybrid Living Systems, Responsive Cladding, Surface as Interface, Augmented Building Technologies, and Individuated Experience. Initial informal efforts have evolved with this team into a focused and funded university-based research. The projects establish a collaborative platform involving designers, scientists, and engineers and a new family of spatial problems where, architecture is re-charged.

The work of Chicago architect Ralph Johnson explores the use of restrained modernism to enrich and clarify complex programmatic buildings with intriguing assemblies that reveal their functions and hierarchical relationships. Mr. Johnson’s goal is to form, through the social art of architecture, an urban environment of buildings that are good civic neighbours as well as distinguished citizens. The projects in this book, both built and unbuilt, represent his concern for humanistic values and emphasis on process rather than preconceived product, allowing the work to respond to diverse cultures and urban conditions. Mr. Johnson is a Principal and the Design Director at Perkins+Will. The book includes essays by Rodolphe el- Khoury, Daniel Friedman and Thomas Fisher.