in between

CÚRE & PENABAD

IN-BETWEEN

A D I B C Ú R E & C A R I E P E N A B A DL O U I S I . K A H N V I S I T I N G A S S I S T A N T P R O F E S S O R S A L e c t u r e a t t h e Y a l e S c h o o l o f A r c h i t e c t u r e

This map describes both the geographic and cultural context of our work and as you can see, Miami is at the center of the image. Miami is arguably a city in between two worlds. When viewed from New Haven it can seem like an exotic province - an outpost - and yet when seen from the Caribbean and South America, it is a capital. It is located at either the edge or the center, depending on your frame of reference, and as such it is a city that is continuously reinventing itself. The Caribbean’s cultural context, geographic circumstance and natural setting has had a profound and often defining influence in the configuration and constitution of the City of Miami.

For us, Miami belongs to the world of the Bahamas, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Curacao, St. Kitts, Cartagena de Indias in Colombia and Havana in Cuba. While there are certainly differences in both the natural and built landscapes of these places, the expansive skies, the emerald green sea, the sponge-like geology and the fantastic flora and fauna are all shared phenomena. For us, this is a world full of light and scorching heat that could only be described with intense blues and greens.

The Caribbean, as defined by the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a place both vivid and terrible, with a dust-choked air that carries the smell of sleeping alligators. It is a magical world of overlapping cultures where the transcendental encounter of the olive and the corn took place, and where many impulses and traditions cross each other. This confluence produces a kind of mestizaje - a blending - both in the people and in the built environment. It is a place where the Giralda Tower of Sevilla is transplanted and transformed into the center piece of the Biltmore Hotel in Miami and where the formal strategies and modernist ideologies of architects such as Le Corbusier are externalized and made more exuberant in response to the climate and the culture of the place. This is the world we come from.

Founded in 1896, Miami is a young city. With a little over a century in the making and still under construction, Miami exists in a precarious line between the metropolis and the swamp; between nature and artifice, business and leisure, myth and reality, virtue and vice. This image depicts the geography of Miami, with Miami Beach and the Atlantic Ocean to the East and South and the swampland of the Everglades to the West. The Miami River runs east to the expansive waters of Biscayne Bay and the place where the city was born and where downtown Miami begins. To the North is Little Haiti, Wynwood and the Design District; while to the South lies Coconut Grove, Little Havana and Coral Gables - all contributing to this mostly manufactured constellation of interconnected cities and islands that are part of our collective memory of Miami.

We spent our formative years as young students of architecture in Miami and returned there to establish our practice and pursue our teaching careers; so in a way, our personal histories are tied to the history and temperament of this place and our own DNA lies in the Caribbean, being both Cuban and Colombian. While we embrace all that makes our geographic circum-stance unique and vibrant, we are not blind to many of the city’s shortcomings. We are fully aware that much of Miami is being built cheaply and quickly and that little consideration is being given to the ways in which individual buildings contribute to the construction of the city. For us this discussion involves the less glamorous but more fundamental discourse that includes the relevance of type, the notion of permanence, the idea of craft, and dare we say, the pursuit of beauty.

Reflecting upon our work for this presentation, we realized that we have been on a constant search to root our buildings in a culture of place that ultimately, finds inspiration in both the vernacular and the academic; the ancient and the contemporary; in the commonplace and the extraordinary. Perhaps due to our own reality, we are able to co-exist comfortably in these seem-ingly opposed worlds. We are open to finding beauty in differences and are always drawn to what makes a place unique. As a result, we are constantly asking ourselves - “What is culturally resonant about this place and how can the work reflect this?” It is our hope that the following projects will illustrate the ways that we have begun to answer this question along the way.

The first project is titled Oak Plaza. It is located within an 18-block neighborhood just north of Downtown Miami.

This area was long forgotten during the periods when suburban sprawl became the standard pattern of growth in the city, but is now experiencing a dramatic urban renewal. Today, the neighborhood is referred to as the Design District.

Along with nearby Wynwood, this part of the city has become the home of leading designers, artists, galleries and showrooms, and yet when one walks through the neighborhood, one quickly realizes that it is still missing the necessary elements needed to create a truly vibrant place including adequate housing, infrastructure and public space.

The challenge for us became how to define a sense of place in an environment that lacked any clear architectural or urban definition. We believed this could be done by the sculpting of architectural form, both at the level of the architecture but also at the urban scale. This image shows the location of the site, highlighting nearby public spaces in pink; it reveals the lack of public spaces throughout the city.

The existing site was a typical Miami underdeveloped asphalt parking lot, but within it stood a sublime landscape of mature white oaks, some of which were over 100 years old; in fact, older than the city itself. From the beginning, our desire was to preserve this small remnant of the native Florida Hammock that was so exceptional within the district; we also wanted to properly define a true center for the area by creating the first public plaza in the neighborhood.

The site is located within a large rectangular block situated west of Biscayne Boulevard and north of the highway. In addition to a new plaza, the project includes the design of a new street, which in our view would allow pedestrians to bisect the length of the existing block, further animating the street life of the neighborhood. In pink we are showing the new proposed buildings and in white are the public spaces.

The design of the small street provided an unprecedented moment for collaboration. When the client hired us, he also hired another firm to develop a building on the other side of the street. Rather than working in isolation, we chose to establish a dialogue - a kind of urban conversation - in the belief that if we were able to structure similarities within the urban realm, we would be able to create a more memorable street section that would be in striking contrast to the immediate environment which often lacks urban continuity.

Returning to the plaza - which was always for us the heart of the project - we transformed the existing parking lot into an urban carpet of Caribbean limestone. The use of this stone was important for us because it is a material that connects the site to its geological region and to Miami’s public building tradition. The edges of the new space were defined by a thin bar building and loggia, fused together as a single building. The continuous urban wall allowed us to create frontages along the new space and the adjacent street.

Both the form and placement of the thin bar building and the loggia resulted from the highly constraining and reduced space that we had to work with, due to the location of the existing large oak trees on the site. In the end, we developed a scheme that relied on thinness. Almost inevitably, the building developed as an “L” shape in plan that both configured the space of the plaza with a coherent urban geometry, and provided spaces for retail and leisure.

This early sketch depicts the single building both as urban infill and liner, but also addressed the different scales of events associated with each. For instance, the narrow door is proportioned and scaled to the main street, while the fifty foot-long bench is scaled to the plaza and the view to Downtown beyond.

When designing the building, we turned to Miami’s vernacular methods of construction, mainly concrete block and steel trowelled stucco with a final wall cladding of brilliant, glass mosaic tile. The references for the tile cladding are also associated with figurative traditions that can be seen throughout the tropics and the Design District itself.

From the beginning, we always felt the elevations of the buildings should be understood as permanent urban paintings or urban murals. We also used tile because we are aware that as in both the nearby Caribbean and the distant landscapes of Thailand, tile has been used in the cladding of buildings throughout the tropics.

In the case of the design of the elevations, the gradations of colored tile generate a rhythm of changing effects that results in the dematerialization of the building’s surface. While this facade cannot be classified as a lightweight curtain wall, in our minds it does constitute a “free façade” insofar as the visual quality of the surface is seen independent of the wall’s tectonic conditions. Furthermore the intense use of color and the reflective quality of the material allows the buildings to be both cleansed by the incessant rains and protected from the strong light of the tropics, an often violent light that bleaches and weathers most surfaces.

At close range, Oak Plaza’s building facades are composed of ¾” glass mosaic tiles arranged incrementally in 1’-0” x 1’-0” sheets. This assembly resembles that of a pointillist painting, which when viewed from close up may be indiscernible but when seen from a distance merges the small increments of concentrated color into a recognizable image.

The urban mural is intended to act as a form of public display, a public painting that plays upon the area’s primary function as an Arts District. Here we see one of the primary elevations facing the plaza.

The color and tactility of surface that we were pursing in the elevations are also investigated in the details of the paving throughout the project. We designed the floors with different textures. Working closely with the stone masons on the field, we became interested in exploring different ways of cutting and installing the limestone.

We became fascinated by the subtle differences of stone sizes, shapes and varying colors. In some areas, we used Florida keystone, in others Dominican shellstonel; the shellstone is denser and more pink than the keystone. We used the various stones to articulate different areas of the plaza and adjacent spaces.

We were also interested in how the building turned the corner, in part because we knew that the stone and the tile would be highly exposed at this moment. Thus, we developed a tight curve for both, and in the case of the stone we had it cut as a single piece for greater strength and to hide its true thickness.

While relatively small in scale, the project taught us great lessons. In a place like Miami, a city which is often defined by disrespectful, non-descript structures that rarely strive to create memorable streets or public spaces, we wanted the project to offer a distinct and coherent urban architecture; an architecture that would ultimately illustrate our fundamental belief that architecture is first and foremost a civic art.

This next project engages a different scale of buidling. The project is called MDO.

It is located one lot south of Tamiami Trial (also referred to as Eighth Street or Calle Ocho), here shown as the pink line running along the center of the map. It is one of Miami’s main streets and runs east-west across the city. The street connects the great swamp of the Everglades on the Far West with Downtown, the mouth of the Miami river and Biscayne Bay on the East. The circle indicates the site where the building is located. This site plan shows the immediate context of the project.

The project site is defined and surrounded by countless strip shopping malls and speculative office buildings. Typical to this area of Miami, most of these buildings are set a great distance away from the main road in their infinite need to accommodate extensive surface parking lots. The image also reveals its location adjacent to Eighth Street.Eighth Street is one of those American roads where commercial signage dominates the landscape and where the signage is cleverly designed both in scale and placement to be seen not only from the sidewalk, but most importantly, from the car.

The result is a cacophony of structures emblematic of Miami’s bleak suburban landscape.

We started working on this building at the beginning of the “Great Recession” and from the onset we had to confront the challenges of a limited budget as well as a less than optimal site and a stringent zoning and building code. Yet we took on the project, primarily because we found common ground with an unconventional client who was interested in developing a building to redefine their retail brand; and in so doing, transform the existing context. We also wanted to engage a real and not an idealized Miami main street with the aim of confronting the aesthetic challenge of working within the quotidian com-mercial landscape, recomposing and transforming the elements of the commercial vernacular including: signage, commercial shopfronts, the suburban lawn and even the painted asphalt that covers most of the city’s streets. Thus the proposed project reverses the typical urban patterns of the area by pressing the building close to the street and placing the surface parking lot along the rear of the property.

The plan is composed of a principal double-volume retail space whose 55 foot span is bridged using concrete double T’s, the standard for long-span parking garages in the area; and the plan’s thickened walls are lined with stacked rows of merchandise. Most of the services and office space take place in the rear and on the second floor mezzanine.

In section, the heightened volume — an intentional shift in scale — is an unexpected spatial experience for the area. The context is defined by low, eight-foot ceilings, typically stacked one above the other. The section also shows our concern with the idea of manipulating daylight. We chose to flood the building with natural light, converting the direct natural light into a soft indirect ambient light. This condition is in direct opposition to the cavernous, artificially-lit interiors typical of the adjacent strip malls and office parks. The skylights also gave us an opportunity to integrate some of the necessary mechanical systems.

As mentioned earlier, the project began at the onset of the recession and almost by necessity, we were obliged to explore an architecture of scarcity. We developed a language of abstraction and restraint, where the range of materials and compositional moves were limited to a few carefully selected elements. One of the most prominent elements is a 10 foot diameter metallic sign placed perpendicular to the building’s front façade.

By removing this sign from the clutter of much of the signage that punctuates the existing road, we transformed an element that would otherwise be ordinary within this context into something that was special and unique. In addition, the base of the front elevation is inflected to compose the 12’-0” high glass for the shopfront, and to produce a much needed recessed space that protects the visitor from rain or sun upon entry, imbuing the building with a degree of corporality and solidity that is in sharp contrast to the persistent thinness of the adjacent construction.

The south elevation has only one opening. In this case, it is a large circular window that brings light into a small meeting space within the building as it faces the side entrance into the parking area. Once again, we wanted to produce an illusion of thickness; so we poured a deep, circular concrete frame around the window and pressed the glass deep into the space of the opening. This recess created a more dramatic shadow on the exterior.

The rear façade was conceived quite differently. We understood this to be the most utilitarian of the elevations. So this is the one that collects and composes the generic inventory of elements of the surrounding context. The repertoire is all there: the out-swinging casement windows, the downspouts, the concrete eyebrows, the thickly applied colored asphalt and its corre-sponding painted signage. All are composed as a straightforward, symmetrical façade that registers both the lower and upper levels in an intentionally domestic scale.

This view of the interior shows the high space of the main room with the more compressed area of the changing rooms beyond and the elliptical mezzanine level window where the owner’s office is located. This window allows him to have a direct view of the main entrance and the space below, and was literally designed as an ‘eye’ looking down from above.

This is a view of the signage as it was finally executed and designed to be read from both sides of the street.

And lastly, this is a view from Eighth Street. It is the image that we feel best represents the project, showing the building as a silent and rather enigmatic white box set in sharp contrast to the chorus of loud voices and gestures of its surrounding urban scene.

This next project involved the restoration and completion of a historic house in Coral Gables, Florida. The city of Coral Gables was developed by George Merrick and was one of the first planned garden cities in the country. Merrick wanted to create a sense of place by producing an architecture that could imbue the city with a sense of history. To do this, he conceived of the idea of an American Mediterranean, and the early architecture of Coral Gables borrowed from the alluring images of distant cities, mainly Spanish and Italian, transforming these examples to reflect the realities of the local building culture.

These buildings were set within a lush tropical landscape, indeed one of the most memorable aspects of the city.Within this predominantly Mediterranean-inspired architecture, Merrick decided to introduce a number of planned villages in differing styles. He believed that this would provide the city with greater architectural diversity. Our clients, a painter and a South African artist and filmmaker, purchased the smallest house in the Dutch South African Village, which is the southernmost village seen here on the map.

This is a close up of the Dutch South African Village. It is a collection of houses located on a triangular parcel of land along Le Jeune Road - one of the most important north-south streets of Coral Gables. The original houses were designed by Marion Sims Wyeth and built just prior to the devastating hurricane of 1926. Wyeth himself was a talented New York architect, who is best known for his work in Palm Beach. The architecture of the Village was modeled on the 17th and 18th century farm houses built by Dutch colonists in Cape Town, South Africa.

The project initially involved research and the production of a complete set of drawings of the existing conditions of the house. However, this wasn’t enough because most of the important architectural details of the house had been stripped away. We needed to extend our documentation beyond the house itself to include important details seen throughout the village, including original windows, doors, tiles etc. We were acting as architectural archaeologists of sorts trying to reconstruct the profiles and details of the original in an effort to not only educate ourselves, but also to instruct the future contractor of the project, since many local builders have lost the knowledge of how to restore these historic details.

During the 1920’s, the writer and leading Florida conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas poetically described the archi-tectural characteristics that defined Coral Gables’ residential architecture. She spoke of the discrete elements that gave these houses their charm including the undulating surfaces of the stuccoed walls, that she said were capable of catching and reflect-ing the intense Florida sunlight; clay roof tiles that were shaped on the thighs of Cuban workers interlocked in a weave that created a rich and watercolor-like pattern ranging from rust to pale green; lime based paints that gracefully weathered under

the Florida sun, and finely crafted wooden windows and balconies that opened up the house to the prevailing breezes. When we read Stoneman Douglas’ text, the words resounded with us because it was these very same characteristics that were being stripped away from most of the houses being restored in the city today. Natural materials are systematically being replaced by synthetic ones that lack the craft, and more importantly, the sensorial qualities of the original. This reality is changing the character of the streetscape.

So for us, this project was about working slowly, paying close attention to the small things that we believe make a world of difference, particularly when they are repeated time and time again in the building of the fabric of the city.

This is the plan of the house. It is composed of an L-shaped building pressed against the street with a stoep (or covered porch) at the rear. To the south is a linear drive that ends in a detached cottage. The remainder of the site is a garden. We restored the original house and made a number of additions that had been originally proposed by Marion Syms Wyeth but never completed: these included a small front stoep with 2 concrete benches, a rear stoep, and a series of garden structures including a laundry room, plunge pool and bench.

The stoep, which literally means elevated step, is one of the most important elements of the Cape Town homestead. It takes the form of an uncovered, elevated terrace, a vine-covered pergola or even a covered porch supported by masonry piers. They often incorporate masonry benches at either end for rest and leisure. Here you can see the restored partial elevation of the house with the small front stoep to the left; above are two drawings of the Cape Town homesteads we utilized as references.

This is a view of the completed stoep seen from the interior. We completed the additions in the manner of the original, willfully blurring the seams between the existing and the new. We did this because we believed that it was the appropriate way to bring the work to a level of completion and architectural wholeness. Throughout the course of the project, the words of our teacher Vincent Scully keep resounding in our heads. Scully was a faculty at the University of Miami while we were undergraduates there and like at Yale, he inspired generations of students. In his lectures he would occasionally point out that architects needed to know when to shout and when to be silent.

His words resurfaced here for us and in this project we became comfortable with a certain degree of architectural anonymity, believing that it was the best way to restore the house. These are two views of the exteriors. On the left is the side yard with the cottage at the rear, and on the right is the cottage with the new attached service space. The references for the laundry room’s forms can be found in a variety of South African rural buildings constructed by Malaysian craftsman who could skillfully manipulate complex, curvilinear surfaces.

Special attention was paid to the design of the custom hardware for the house. It was inspired by traditional South African hardware details and transformed to meet the needs of the contemporary residence.The interiors were conceived in a restrained black and white palette. Ebony stained wood floors and steeply pitched dark wooden ceilings in the living room contrasted against the undulating white surfaces of the interior plastered walls.

This palette extended itself into the selection of objects for the interior including furniture and artwork. The interiors bring to-gether tradition and modernity, setting the work of contemporary Dutch designers such as Maarten Baas and Marcel Wanders, alongside examples of traditional South African folk art. It is a world where the old and the new can comfortably co-exist, an affinity that resounded with us and our clients.

This is the final view of the completed elevation seen from the main road. The small house is set behind a fantastic oak tree and a gnarly sea grape that signals that the ocean is close by.

This next project is a competition entry that we produced for the design of 6 new public spaces for Barranquilla’s historic city center. The image on the left is the book cover of an academic publication that we produced some time ago. The painting is by the local folk artist Noé León and depicts a riverboat cruising along the Magdalena River.

Barranquilla is a city with little recorded history. It developed informally sometime during the mid 17th century in an area that was configured by a series of small gullies or barrancas, the natural feature that gives the city its name. The map depicts the Mag-dalena River to the east connecting to the Caribbean Sea. Arroyos can be described as raging urban waterways that cause great harm to the city and its inhabitants. Adib was familiar with this phenomenon because he had grown up in Colombia but I learned of it and experienced it for the first time when mapping Barlovento, an informal settlement immediately adjacent to the city center.

Decades of suburban sprawl have resulted in the abandonment of the city center and a slow process of urban and architectural degradation. Today the city center is overrun by retail that occupies the first and second stories of existing buildings, while the upper floors remain largely vacant. There is a dramatic lack of public open space. Even the most historic plaza, the Plaza San Nicolás has been overrun by informal markets that have consumed the principal gathering space.

For the last several years, we have been mapping informal settlements in the Global South. We began as far away as Cape Town and Mumbai and then concentrated our efforts closer to home. We have been interested in drawing these settlements to try to understand them as architects and urban designers. We believe these cities are vernacular expressions of a given people worthy of study. We have mapped over a dozen settlements from the overall urban fabric to the individual house looking for what is both unique and specific to each place but also trying to understand if there are any broader universal themes that

can be seen from settlement to settlement. We are not blind to the great challenges facing these cities, but we do believe that alongside the challenges, they have lessons to teach us. We wanted to make reference to this research here because it is an instance where our academic work has overlapped with our practice, one informing the other. This is perhaps the great benefit of the teacher-practitioner model that we have been pursuing.

So returning to Barlovento. What did we learn from this place? Unlike the formal city, Barlovento has figured out a way to deal with the arroyos. The community dug a canal that is capable of accepting and redirecting the flow of water to the Magadalena River. This reality saves Barlovento from destruction each rainy season, whereas the city center has no adequate way of manag-ing the large amount of water run-off. It has built over its natural gullies and has no storm water drainage system. When we asked the planning officials about this, they seemed unphased and in fact they compared the arroyos with severe New England snowstorms, claiming that these storms also paralyze the city for days.

Nevertheless, we returned to Miami, and set out to map the location of the worst arroyos and see if there was a way that we could overlap this map with the development of the public spaces described in the brief. This drawing maps the main arroyos that form on the western edge of the city and make their way through the historic city center. What we discovered was that one of the largest arroyos ran parallel to 38th Street, which connects the northernmost plaza of the brief with the existing Paseo Bolívar and the historic Plaza San Nicolás. Realizing this, we decided to add a 6th public open space to the design.

This is a plan of the proposed spaces within the block and street pattern of the historic city center. We propose a new Paseo connecting Calle Murillo to the existing Paseo Bolívar. We felt it would become one of the most important east-west roads for the city, intersecting the existing Paseo Bolívar with the Plaza San Nicolás, the oldest and most emblematic plaza of the city. Making way for the new Paseo would allow the construction of a proper underground storm drainage system that could redirect the large flow of water to the nearby canal and eventually out to the river.

In designing the various spaces, we began with a series of desires, preoccupations and observations. We were interested in sculpting clearly defined streets or urban rooms capable of serving as the backdrop to the events of everyday urban life. We were also keenly aware of the climatic conditions of the place. The intense light played into our thoughts for the selection of materi-als. We wanted to use resilient materials that could weather gracefully in this light. Finally, we were searching for inspiration in popular culture and local building traditions as a way of trying to create a public realm that could be a reflection of this place.

These are a collection of drawings for the New Paseo de las Palmas. As mentioned earlier, the new paseo serves to connect the edges of the City Center (Calle Murillo) with the Paseo Bolívar. The new pedestrian boulevard is lined with street level arcades and infill buildings that range from 5 to 8 stories. The floor of the paseo is designed as an intricate pattern of caliza stone and granite, reminiscent of the patterns of local textiles.

The patterns from the center of the Acacia trunks, create a textured urban carpet. This is a moment of heightened detail, in sharp contrast to the concrete sidewalks and surfaces prevalent throughout the city. At the western edge of the Paseo is the new Plaza de las Palmas. Here we proposed a new museum for the carnival that acts as an urban gate towards the historic city.

The Plaza del Hospital ends the southern edge of the Paseo Bolívar. It is flanked by the historic Hospital de la Caridad on one end and a proposed new school across the street. The school includes retail at grade and classrooms above. For the south-facing elevation, we developed a deep loggia with a patterned screen that protects the interior from the harsh light. The ground is detailed with stripes of brilliantly colored concrete and asphalt. The colors are directly inspired by the colorful fabrics produced in the region.

The Plaza San José redefines the edges of the existing plaza. Once again, landscape is used at two scales, with palms along the edges and canopy trees within that create a more intimate shaded space over a perimeter bench that defines the new edges of the plaza.

The Plaza San Roque proposes a great urban roof over the existing space. The current plaza is located next to the Church of San Roque. The roof, which is the most distinctive element of the proposal is cantilevered from an L-shaped bar of program that houses the seminary for the adjacent church and additional retail program. The floor is designed in varying patterns of yellow and grey with urban furniture and a large statue of Saint Rocco, the city’s patron saint.

Finally, the Plaza San Nicolás, previously the Plaza de Colón, is the oldest plaza in the city and the space around which the original settlement was developed. Our first desire was to re-open the streets that once surrounded the plaza so we could better connect the existing space to the surrounding fabric. We divided the plaza into 2 zones, a paved heavily landscaped space in front of the Church and a smaller triangular plaza to one side. Once again, the yellow and grey floor patterns of caliza stone and granite unite this design to the others in the proposal. We proposed a stand of pink oaks for the main space because it is the emblematic tree of the city. It is striking because of its color but also rugged and capable of withstanding the harsh climate.

This last project involves the design of a large corporate headquarter for a sugar mill in Southern Guatemala. The project is currently under construction and has allowed us to confront the challenges of designing a large public building. The client brief provoked us to think about the ways that a building can change the culture of a company and impact the way in which people communicate.

The project site is located within Guatemala’s lowlands. This is a flat, coastal landscape where sugarcane fields rise seven feet above grade in most places. To the North is Guatemala City and the extraordinary Agua and Acatenango Volcanoes, and to the South is the Pacific Ocean. Our clients asked us to design a single building that would express the company’s collaborative and creative spirit.

Our first step was to gather information. We began to research office spaces beginning with the Uffizi, through postwar American corporate models and ending in post social networking spaces such as the headquarters for Facebook. We examined the physi-cal characteristics of each project as well as the relationship between the individual and the collective spaces in the building.

What we generally discovered was that companies that promoted creative, collaborative work, generally gave less individual desk space to their workers. In turn, they provided a greater amount of shared space where chance encounters and meetings could occur.

Beyond figuring out how many new people would be hired, the clients had a more fundamental preoccupation: they wanted to figure out if an ideally sized working environment existed. When did someone feel part of a community and when had it become too large that the networks of communication began to break down?

We came across the work of British Anthropologist Robin Dunbar. He believes that a single individual can maintain a stable, socially cohesive group with between 100 and 230 people, and he set his ideal number at 150. More recently anthropologists H. Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth have done a variety of field studies in the United States and have proposed an increased number of 290 people with a median of 231. They attribute this increase to technological advances and the dramatically dif-ferent way that we build social or working networks today.

The main building is located within a well defined precinct edged by a continuous perimeter wall and a series of gardens. It is precisely oriented to the cardinal points of the compass. This manner of orienting buildings in this region dates back to pre-Colombian Mayan civic building traditions. The building’s long axis is aligned east-west allowing us to place it parallel to the main road, while providing us an opportunity to establish the main entry on the north-south axis, framing a direct view to the volcanoes beyond.

This is the site plan where you see the project surrounded by sugarcane fields to the north and west and with the company’s current office buildings to the south.

The new building is composed of 3 parts: the plinth, the wall and the roof. This early sketch shows our desire to raise the building off the ground so we could set the first floor above the height of the sugar cane fields.

Lifting the building off the ground plane allows us to capitalize on the prevailing breezes from the Southwest and protects the building from flood waters during the rainy season. The plan is organized as a repetitive module for ease of construction.

These are a series of diagrams for the central portion of the building where we were studying the layout of the desks and the relationship between the desks and the surrounding open space.

The effect is a diffused lighting condition for the main hall that permits the interior to function with little to no artificial lighting for most of the day. The lower realm is lined in wood and the upper mezzanine and ceiling are painted in white.

The following drawing depicts the proposed building in its context. We wanted the building to have a clearly discernable figure and a scale that could register against the vast tropical landscape. Our references came from both the industrial generic sheds of the area as well as the venerable Mayan pyramidal structures.

We are part of the last generation of architects that was trained principally by hand. The computer came into our repertoire dur-ing graduate school and today we use these mediums interchangeably, depending upon the investigation or desired outcome. These drawings in particular are exploring a mix of digital and hand techniques. Here, we are not only interested in depicting the building within the particulars of its geographic and cultural context; we are also interested in the narrative of the drawing and depicting the scene at a precise moment in time: in this case, the day of the zafra or the cutting of the cane. This is a day of great celebration where the large statue of Our Lady of the Rosary, leads the festive procession through the fields.

The elevations are composed of large expanses of masonry walls. The lower section of the wall is developed in exposed con-crete with a hammered finish. It is punctuated by a repetitive series of deeply recessed spaces that serve as outdoor terraces between the meeting rooms. Large, operable, glass walls are set twelve feet from the perimeter and therefore the glass is always in deep shadow.

The upper wall finds its inspiration in the unadorned stuccoed walls of Guatemala’s vernacular architecture. Here the wall is painted in white with a few openings at key locations in the building. A white metal roof figures itself against the skyline culminating in a skylight that allows natural light into the main space.

This is a view taken atop the elevated platform with the flanking gardens and the recessed outdoor terraces.

The light in this area of the world is a particular one. Being so close to the equator, the sun is almost always directly overhead. As a result, very little surface projections can produce dramatic shadows. The overhead light, directly influenced the design of the skylight. We limited the glazing of the skylight to the side walls and developed a system of louvers to further protect the glazing from direct sunlight.

Similarly, this view is taken from the garden at sunset on that first day of the cutting of the sugarcane. The sky has the pink glow of dusk and the flowers from the procession still lay on the ground. The horse in the distance is the only figure that remains after the inaugural festivities have ended.

While uniformity has become a global epidemic and placelessness is now an integral part of our everyday lives, the projects we have shown you here tonight are conceived otherwise. We are exploring the potential to create drawings, spaces and buildings of cultural specificity where tradition and invention, the colloquial and the academic, the regional and the universal, participate in the composition and construction of the contemporary city.

A D D E N D U MP r o j e c t s o n t h e B o a r d s

I N-BETWEEN

Escuelita Buganvilia

Colegio Interamericano

H • I Penthouse

COLLABORATORSAbraham AluicioLeticia AcostaDavid AldanaM. Antonia BoteroAlvaro BrigantiCharles BrownEce CakirMarcus ChaidezCraig ChowaniecMarissa ConteNicolás Delgado AlcegaMike GaleaCristina GutiérrezAndrew HaehnShalina JaffarEdward LairdConstantino LoucaMark LummermanAlice OliveiraMichael O’NiellCatherine O’SullivanVictoria PiñerosBilly QuattlebaumAlbert RodríguezFernanda SoteloKetkarn TokaranyasetChristopher Zardoya

IN-BETWEENAdib Cúre and Carie Penabad

Design: Cúre & PenabadTypeface: Berthold Akzidenz GroteskPrinting and Binding: Blurb, United States

© 2014 Cúre & Penabad

Photo Credits: © Steven Brooks (Slides 18; 20; 25-26; 36; 39-43)© Ariella Grossman (Slides 53; 56 left-58; 62)© Simon Hare (Slides 19; 23)© Catherine O’Sullivan (Slides 28; 38; 44; 85; 100)© Daniel Portnoy (Slides 55-56 right; 59)© Corey Weiner (Slides 21)

Model Credits:Charles Brown (Slide 13)Mike Galea (Slides 85; 100)

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or manner whatsoever without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Cúre & PenabadMiami, Floridawww.cureandpenabad.com

ISBN 978-0-9905533-0-4

Printed in the United States

We thank our friend Ivonne De La Paz for her editorial assistance.

X P R E S S

in between

Documents

s s i s t

city of miami

o u i s i

miami beach

geography of miami

miami river

downtown miami

e s c h o o