CNU Florida - the Congress for the New Urbanism

ARCHITECTURE
A building apart

BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI
aviglucci@herald.com
Posted on Sun, Oct. 16, 2005

It looks like something ancient and strange, a medieval abbey or Byzantine church, dropped among the cozy little Bauhaus boxes of the University of Miami's School of Architecture.

At a time when Modernist architecture is once again in vogue, the UM school's long-planned new building, designed by polemical and idiosyncratic anti-Modernist architect Leon Krier, is a willfully contrarian deed: an homage to centuries-old tradition rising over the nation's first all-Modern college campus.

You might expect no less from UM's architecture school.

Ensconced in a university built in the rectilinear Modernist style after World War II, the relatively young architecture school has earned a national rep by nurturing the opposition -- the New Urbanism, a movement that champions traditional notions of planning and design scorned by much of the profession since Modernism's rise 90 years ago.

No glass cubes here, please.

Instead, there are thick whitewashed walls, a buttressed octagonal auditorium appositely crowned by a hollow tower and a belfry, a substantial arched portico, a colonnade and roof-corner ornaments shaped like kitten ears.

The school and its dean, New Urbanism co-founder Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, plainly hope the new Jorge M. Perez Architecture Center will become a recognized emblem of the school and its mission.

''Krier is of the school of thought that traditional architecture is a living form,'' Plater-Zyberk said. ``As a school, we inculcate in students that individual buildings are place makers and give form to the public realm and that the richest environment engages a long trajectory of history.''

USEFUL, TOO

The building also fills a functional role, of course. Even as it has grown in renown, UM's architecture school has had no auditorium, insufficient classroom and exhibition space, no real focal point. Famed architecture historian Vincent Scully, whose course is a spring stalwart at the school, used to lecture in a cramped room where columns obstruct students' views. Visiting speakers trooped across campus, heavy slides in tow, to a borrowed lecture hall.

The new building will provide that space, at the not-inconsiderable cost of $6 million, covered by private donors who include Perez, the Miami high-rise condo developer whose name it bears.

But it is chiefly as exemplar, if not as provocation, that Krier's building seems bound to prove captivating to some, off-putting to others.

''One of the ironies of the institution is that it has produced an outstanding school of architecture that's all about going back and relearning the lessons of the past, going all the bay back to Vitruvius,'' said Randall Robinson, author of a forthcoming guide to Miami architecture and a devotee of the university's early Modern buildings. ``In that sense, it's appropriate that that whole ethos should be expressed in brick and mortar.''

There has been, however, some discreet eye-rolling among UM faculty members, alumni and students at the new building's cost, its blank concrete walls and what some see as its awkward relationship to the surrounding campus. At least one architectural caricature was posted on a school bulletin board.

The university administration at first resisted Krier's ideas because they violated the campus design code, which requires flat rooflines and prohibits traditional elements like arches and tiled roofs. Campus planners relented only after what Krier described as a long battle, but still disallowed overhanging eaves and the ''highly seductive'' color and decoration he wanted to give the building.

''This was very much a power struggle,'' Krier said in an interview. ``The administration was extremely unsympathetic.''

Some note other supposed ironies: That the building is partly funded by a developer of high-rises, which Krier reviles as destroyers of urbanity. That it stands apart from its neighbors in look and style, when New Urbanists extol harmony and continuity in the urban fabric. That it is neither Classical nor purely traditional, but a peculiar combination of elements from antiquity -- a bell tower with no bell, a freestanding colonnade supporting only wires for climbing vines, buttresses buttressing nothing but small half-moon windows.

''It's amazing Krier has designed a building that does exactly what he critiques,'' said prominent Modernist Miami architect Roney Mateu, a UM grad who has designed a ''very modern'' addition to the university's Lowe Museum. ``The Krier building as an object appears to have very little to do with its context. It appears to have very little to do with the campus, very little to do with South Florida. It's a bad idea poorly executed.''

DIFFERENT VIEW

But at least one avowed Modernist is quite taken by it.

The building's contradictions and juxtapositions make it a fascinating starting point for discussions about planning and contemporary architecture, said John Stuart, a design and architecture history professor at Florida International University's architecture school.

''It's kind of radical,'' said Stuart, who has been sending students and colleagues to see the building as it went up. ``People's jaws drop. It's what it must have been like for people 50 years ago seeing Modernism for the first time. It causes you to question everything. The idea of bringing a medieval building to Miami today, to that campus, is a very strong statement about challenging the way we think about architecture.''

Yet Krier and Plater-Zyberk said their intent was not to jolt visitors nor to plant a thumb in their foes' eye. That, after all, is what Modernists do.

''It doesn't cause scandal,'' said Krier, commonly regarded as the intellectual godfather of New Urbanism. ``That is not what you want to do, but to harmonize and create something that is not jarring, not just a building, but a space.''

To expect Krier to produce a pure, traditional building is to miss the point, Plater-Zyberk said. His design doesn't photocopy the past; it wields traditional forms and details as a tool kit, but combines its elements in innovative ways. The building largely resists categorization, she said, though ''neo-traditionalist'' may fit best.

''I think there's a very good design intuition at work here,'' Plater-Zyberk said. ``It will be teaching our students forever.''

How the building interacts with its surroundings is just as important, she said: It echoes the simplicity and scale of the school's three-story Bauhaus buildings, designed as dorms in the 1940s by Marion Manley, who was responsible for many of the university's earliest and most distinguished buildings. The new center's elongated exhibition and classroom wing, separated from the auditorium by a breezeway, is no wider than the narrow older buildings. The stark white paint blends in with its also-white neighbors, and its surfaces and details are designed to play off Miami's sun to create shadow effects.

The new building was also carefully placed to create a series of paved plazas around it, giving students spaces in which to congregate and turning the site, Plater-Zyberk hopes, into a hub of school activity both formal and informal.

And though traditional in inspiration, the building hardly eschews technological advances. The roof is exposed metal. The auditorium is wired for the Internet; the other wing has wireless capability. Lighting is high-tech, the audiovisual system state-of-the-art. And it has hurricane windows.

Krier's building, Plater-Zyberk said, is in sum the school's rejoinder to the Modernist dictum that architecture must embody its time. What that has meant in practice, she and Krier contend, is anonymous, out-scaled architecture, destruction of the historic urban fabric in city after city and the pursuit of novelty for novelty's sake.

''We can look back on the 20th century with some dismay as to how Modernism treated what came before,'' Plater-Zyberk said. ``This is an interesting reversal of that process of a new building coming into an old context. Our teaching, and what this building exhibits, is there is a way to incorporate history with our time.''

Will architecture take notice?

The profession and its press still by and large champion the Modernist and the cutting-edge and dismiss the work of New Urbanists as nostalgic, perverse or naive, an aesthetic dead end.

As Plater-Zyberk guided a visitor through the new building last month, she couldn't help noting that day's New York Times carried a piece about new buildings at architecture schools in the city -- all uniformly glass-sheathed Modernist buildings.

''I guess we're out of step,'' she joked.

`MEMORABLE'

But Plater-Zyberk, a polished diplomat not given to bombast, adds: ``Krier's work is as high-quality as you get. I think this will be one of the few memorable architecture buildings in the country.

``So if it's not covered, it's because of avant-garde bias.''

Yet Krier's building may remain an anomaly in its own home.

The university approved the Krier building as a nod to its architecture school's teachings, said UM's campus planner, Janet Gavarrete, who predicted it would become a ''campus icon.'' But she also called it a ''departure'' for the university.

As it embarks on a massive building spree, the university's selection of architects suggests it intends no wholesale deviation into traditionalist design. Its pick for a big, important addition to the University Center: Arquitectonica, Miami's flashy name-brand entry in the school of new Modernist design.

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