RE LOG Spring '25

SPRING 2025 Ransom Everglades LOG 9 But with all this – and by far not the least of her achievements – she and her husband Bernardo Fort-Brescia are also parents and grandparents. All of their children attended Ransom Everglades and the eldest of their seven grandchildren is in the RE Class of 2029. Of the next generation, there are two architects, two physicians and two landscape architects. With four of her children in the design world, Arquitectonica has become what is probably one of the world’s biggest “mom-and-pop” shops. Spear and Fort-Brescia founded Arquitectonica in 1977 along with three other architects (who subsequently left to establish separate practices). At the time it was conceived as an experimental design studio. Spear and Fort-Brescia moved forward with Arquitectonica, gaining a worldwide reputation for buildings that tested preconceptions, explored new forms and materials, and sometimes even seemed to defy gravity. Arquitectonica’s early architectural work was notable for its daring use of color and geometry, and it garnered international attention. The “Pink House” Spear designed for her parents (it has five different shades of pink subtly articulating the design) was widely publicized and in many ways seemed to empower architects not just in Florida but across the country to use color; now, buildings with lively and colorful facades seem almost a given, but 40 years ago, the dominant palette in Miami and beyond was basically beige and gray. A subsequent Arquitectonica project, the Atlantis Brickell Avenue, became world-famous as the freeze-frame in the opening sequence of Miami Vice , the hit television show that ran from 1984-89. The Atlantis featured not only primary colors but an imaginative geometry that included a blue super-grid on the façade, a red triangle on the rooftop and a red spiral staircase in the middle of a yellow square opening midway up the building. Arquitectonica’s work was different — the architecture of the era had somehow grown bland and dull, but theirs was not. It was experimental and exploratory, architecture that seems to replace the more usual approaches to design not with a “why” but with “why not?” It was this particular combination of invention, daring aesthetics and artistry that led to a 1984 museum exhibition at what was then called the Center for the Fine Arts, now the Perez Art MuseumMiami. “Arquitectonica: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow” featured drawings, scale models and photographs and went on to museums in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Montreal and Grenoble, France – a stunning accomplishment for an architectural practice that was at that time just seven years old. The exhibition established Arquitectonica on the world stage. PortMiami Tunnel - 2014 Atlantis - 1982 Perez Art Museum Miami - 2013 Pink House - 1977 Photo by Suzanne Kores