RE LOG Spring '25

10 Ransom Everglades LOG SPRING 2025 Ballet Valet or G1 Parking Garage Miami Beach - 1996 Miami Children’s Museum - 2003 In the four decades since that exhibition, Arquitectonica has designed hundreds of buildings – condominiums, hotels, courthouses, performing arts centers, basketball arenas (most notably for the Miami Heat) and much more. In the annals of architecture, however, Spear has always been most intimately connected to early, avant-garde geometric, painterly work, including for such cultural institutions as the Miami Children’s Museum and the Miami City Ballet headquarters in Miami Beach’s Collins Park along with the United States Courthouse downtown and two other Brickell Avenue condominium buildings, the Palace and the Imperial. One bold new idea begat yet another. All the while, Fort-Brescia and Spear shared their passions with their children. “Growing up with architects is great,” said Marisa Fort ’98 , the eldest child and a part-time architecture teacher at RE. “They are hyper-educated, excellent generalists, and tend to have a critical/questioning eye. Architecture is everywhere around us all the time; life is enriched by being able to understand it.” Fort is passing on her family’s passion by teaching a studio course in architecture for upper school students, developing an original curriculum intended not just to lure young students into the profession but to help create far more aesthetically knowledgeable citizens. It is an exciting project and one that derives directly from her upbringing, “My mother has modeled so many things to me and my brothers; modeling frommy parents has been the most durable gift.” A chief element of that gift, and one she is now hoping to impart to her Ransom Everglades students, is “a lifelong love and fearlessness of learning.” Spear displayed that fearlessness with a career shift after two decades at Arquitectonica. It was the Ballet Valet Parking Garage & Retail Centre that Arquitectonica designed in the mid-1990s that proved to be a turning point. The garage rises above a block of Art Deco storefronts in South Beach, its façade covered with plants (engendering numerous nicknames from the hanging gardens of Babylon to the “chia pet” to perhaps the- mountain-that-came-to-Miami) but also an early venture in uniting architecture and nature. Spear terms that project “a paradigm shift.” Arquitectonica’s profile continued to grow upwards and outwards with skyscrapers and signature structures around the world, truly a global reach with offices on four continents. And simultaneously, Spear began to look to the land and the landscape – not with nostalgia but rather with a keen eye for and a deep understanding of consequences and found herself yearning for a different kind of “big change,” one that was almost anomalous to the skyscraper city. “Sometimes,” she said, “big change can be tiny and incremental, but it is still big change.”