With an estimated 18,000 people in attendance this weekend, dozens of workshops and seminars and a jam-busting expo show, the American Institute of Architects has filled the Miami Beach Convention Center with talk of the profession's wholehearted embrace of environmental sustainability and the newest energy-saving materials and designs, and... Jeepers, it's cold in here!
ARTKABINETT independent collectors know full well the impact of this when attending the Art Basel Fair held here in December. Our community of fine art collectors is often seen toting around jackets and sweaters along with their exhbition brochures.
It's an irony that has escaped no one at this week's massive national convention, where session after session has focused on the urgent need to sharply limit the energy consumption of buildings: Attendees, already stunned by the brilliant sun and sweltering June heat outside, experience yet another shock when they walk into the cavernous convention hall with the AC and artificial lighting at full blast.
"You're roasting one minute and freezing the next,'' said Susan Szenasy, editor of Metropolis magazine, after leading a packed panel on sustainable design and so-called carbon neutrality -- the goal of having buildings that consume no more energy than they can produce. "It's insane."
The convention center is serving as object lesson -- the old way versus the new -- for thousands of architects gathered under its vast, and non-reflective, roof. One, Minnesota architect Stephen Kellert, referred dismissively to "the tyranny of rooms like this'!"
The convention -- under the rubric of "Design for the New Decade'' -- has also been a fruitful opportunity for Miami to strut its stuff before a discerning, influential group that includes some of the country's leading architects.
The profession and its journals are notoriously focused on the New York-Chicago-L.A. axis, and so Miami remains for many practitioners largely terra incognita, architecturally speaking, despite a proliferation of modern and neo-traditional architecture that spans from Mediterranean Revival and Art Deco to the edgiest cutting edge, some homegrown and some designed by globe-trotting "starchitects". The AIA last Miami visited in 1964.
"We lobbied for many years to get them to come south,'' said architect Lourdes Solera, president of the Miami AIA chapter, the convention host. ``We thought we have a lot to offer as a city, young as we are, and crazy and diverse as we are, so for us it was important to convince them we have architecture worth looking at.''
Also on the convention menu: about 75 tours of local architectural landmarks and landscapes designed to give attendees -- with the lure of continuing career-education credits -- the full flavor of the host city.
The tours encompass National Historic Landmarks like Vizcaya and The Biltmore Hotel (shown right), South Beach's Art Deco, MiMo (Miami Modern)everywhere, the airport and seaport, botanical gardens and the condo towers and civic buildings of the prolific Arquitectonica, perhaps the city's best-known firm.
Sold-out tours include Miami's small but growing corpus of green buildings, the Everglades, and the homes of legendary mid-20th Century Miami architect Alfred Browning Parker. Browning Parker and his peers used shaded windows and buildings and orient them to take advantage of cooling breezes
"It is great exposure,'' said Miami architect John Forbes, chair of the local AIA's convention planning committee. "Architecture is part of what makes a city great. The New Yorks, the Chicagos, the San Franciscos, all have great architecture and great architecture communities.''
Miami could become a leader in architectural sustainability if it embraces the heat and humidity that defines it much of the year as an opportunity to come up with new techniques, instead of fighting it, said one attendee. It may even be possible to do without giving up on the AC, she said.
"If Miami takes this seriously, it could lead the world''
courtesy: Miami Herald
