The word "Miami" may conjure images of revitalized Art Deco-turned-boutique hotels and a white-hot real estate market. It comes as a welcome surprise, then, that one of the city's most noted architects, Rene Gonzalez, chose to locate his studio in the leafy, low-rise neighborhood of Morningside.
Away from the noise of downtown and the increasingly posh Design District, Gonzalez and his associate, Monica Vazquez, collaborate with a small team inside a single-story, mid-century modern house.
The way that the studio disappears into its residential surroundings is reflective of the way Gonzalez' has mastered correlating space with place. This has been deemed "vernacular" by some critics, but in a recent studio visit with Architizer, Gonzalez defined his personal meaning of the word. "I think vernacular for us really means interpreting a place and capturing the essence of it. It has nothing to do with the formal qualities or precedence and trying to abstract them," he explains. "It's a more ethereal thing where we're just trying to capture the spirit of a place."
This spirit is evident at the Prairie Avenue project (above), which drew formal inspiration from both the traditional Florida Seminole stilted homes and the growth patterns of coastal mangrove trees. "But it wasn't about taking the mangroves and abstracting them to create a house," clarifies the architect. "It was this idea that the mangroves search for light as they go up, and so the house then took on a quality of not only being elevated and organic, but also searching for light and orienting itself towards the sky." To shelter residents from the chaos of the neighboring Miami Beach Convention Center, the property is focused inward, with floating concrete walls.
Looking through Gonzalez' portfolio, one notes radical changes in the firm's approach to a project's surroundings. This flexibility allows Gonzalez to transition from the insularity of the Prairie Avenue project to the aerie atmosphere of the beach-side Glass tower (above), where mirrored walls and open floor plans reflect and magnify views of the Atlantic.
The cosmopolitanism of Glass is tempered for the Indian Creek project (above), located on a more private island in Biscayne Bay. Here, a series of pavilions and gardens are laced together by catwalks and shaded pathways to capitalize on bay views while ensuring cross-ventilation and easy escape from the sun.
The tendency toward elevated quarters is a natural response to sea level rise. All four of the firm's current residential projects are raised, illustrating that Gonzalez makes site conditions an inherent consideration.
This sensitivity toward place is grounded in the respect that Gonzalez says his team holds for one another. "I think that as a result of that, we have very open conversations about whatever it is we're working on without sugar-coating things," he says. "Since we're working in a small space and interacting on a moment-to-moment basis, everyone's hearing everything. And that creates a very healthy studio culture, because everyone feels they have a vested interest in what's happening next."
Gonzalez and his collaborators are riding the wave of heightened design taste that has rushed Miami's shore in the past decade. "I think the city's architectural culture has changed tremendously with Art Basel," attests Vazquez. "It has brought sort of a more international and open view of the world, and therefore of design and architecture, that was really lacking. And that's allowed us to be able to do the kind of work we love to do—before, it was more complicated."
Despite the firm's expanding portfolio, the desire to remain small and grassroots leaves Gonzalez happily ambivalent toward a relocating to a larger studio. "We've considered some cool spaces downtown, but they're office buildings," he says. "Imagining an office space that's not surrounded by a garden or at street level prevents us from committing to that kind of space. We'll see where we end up."
