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Interview by:

Damir Sinovcic

Images Courtesy of:

Rene Gonzalez Architect

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DESIGN BOOK [DB]: Prior to establishing your practice in Miami you earned a bachelors degree from University of Florida and a Masters degree from UCLA followed by a period of professional practice in California where you worked with Richard Meier and later Frank Israel. What can you tell us about your start in California?

RENE GONZALEZ [RG]: It was a dynamic time because I was exposed to people that were experimenting in ways that is rarely possible in practice. I learned how to be creative in making ideas that generally don't leave the drawing surface into realities. There were people practicing like Frank Israel who I worked for on a house in Jupiter Beach, Morphosis who was building back yard house additions and Frank Gehry who was still building stick buildings and didn't have the kind of budgets he has now. Being in LA and watching these architects develop work definitely affected my formation. I was exposed to unconventional uses of materials and methods of construction that also affected my work. I was really interested in diving in and investigating although I have to admit it took me a while to become open to this. I had done my undergraduate work in the east coast where my training had been very rational and rigorous. At first I found everyone in LA to be too loosey goosey.

DB: What was your involvement with the Getty Museum by Richard Meier?

RG: I worked on the Getty project right after graduating. Richard was my instructor in a design studio at UCLA. I took the studio and was critiqued by him and Michael Palladino who was his design partner. Later, Michael became one of my thesis advisors. It was just a very easy and fluid relationship with them. I didn't feel like a lot needed to be said – there was a common understanding. It was kind of a natural transition after graduation to work in the office. The office was solely dedicated to the Getty at that point. I was working on the project during the design development phases.

DB: What prompted you to return to Florida?

RG: I think in the back of my mind I always thought I would come back to South Florida to practice. I grew up in South Florida and wanted to move back because I felt a connection to the place. What prompted me to come back was actually family. My first daughter was about to be born. We wanted to be close to family and like many good Cubans, you end up moving back to Miami at times like that.

DB: What career path did you pursue after returning to Florida?

RG: When I returned to Florida, I started to work for Mark Hampton who was doing amazing, beautifully detailed work. He was part of the "Sarasota School of Architecture" with Paul Rudolph and he was continuing to explore the modern tendencies of how you can make seamless connections to the landscape, of how to execute buildings that are minimal and timeless and of how to detail them in an exquisite way. So, I went to work with Mark who was working on the Wolfsonian Museum at the time. My experience at the Getty was valuable to him and for me it was exciting to be able to continue working on a museum project. I think working on these two museum projects is what established my interest in museums and art-related work. I worked for Mark for a number of years and then I started to teach. The teaching allowed me to start my practice and not rely on it for a livelihood. I was able to work on projects that I really enjoyed in my practice and I enjoyed teaching at the same time. At the beginning of my career, I was teaching considerably and practicing a little. The scale later shifted to primarily practice.

DB: How long have you been practicing architecture on your own?

RG: I have been practicing for over 10 years. As I said, the office has developed from being an activity during the time when I was teaching to an office where we maintain a staff of approximately 6 architects. It varies in size and I have had as many as 20 employees but I have found that working with a small staff allows me to stay very much in tune with the projects. This works best for me.

DB: The idea of architecture as a sensory experience is a notion your firm seems to embrace, particularly through your material selection. What can you tell us about your design process when it comes to issues of materiality?

RG: You know, it is a process. It starts out with an idea and that idea drives the project not only in terms of the organizational qualities and the development of the formal and spatial qualities, but also in terms of the materiality of the project. It is not about selecting materials or using materials for their own sake or because they are hot or because they are strange, although they often are. It is really more about selecting materials that will allow me to achieve the ideas that we are looking to achieve in the project and that will allow us to explore spatial situations or, formal situations, or whatever it may be that we are interested in achieving in that particular project.

DB: Your firm's description contains a line that states "we believe that buildings should impact us, like people, be loved and leave a lasting impression." What impression do you expect your buildings to make and how?

RG: I think the impressions that one takes with them after having experienced my projects will vary from person to person. What is important is that there is a strong experiential quality within the projects and that people feel this. That experiential quality can be a spatial quality or a tactile quality. It can be at a very large or intimate scale. It is important to have physical and tactile experiences in the building. In other words, that as you are walking through the project, that you feel the weight of the door, that you are dwarfed by the scale of a space or that you sense the silky quality of a surface. Through these experiences and connections, there is an important relationship that is established between the person and the work that will leave a lasting impression. Hopefully this impression will have resonance and will be triggered in your memory at another place in time.

DB: What buildings, by other architects, have left a lasting impression on you and do they inform your own designs in some way?

RG: I think that many experiences inform my work. Those experiences are not always about visiting an iconic building by an architect whom I respect. They are often simple things - like thoughts and questions that come to mind when you are able to reflect on something you are seeing or triggered by a conversation that you are having.

But to try to answer your question directly, I guess the one iconic building that I do remember that moved me tremendously was Louis Kahn's Salk Institute. I never expected it to. I actually lived in LA for a long time before I got around to making the trip down to La Jolla to visit it. It was during a trip back to LA and it was Tod and Billie's Neurosciences Institute that drew me down, not the Salk. But, I remember it being an extremely impactful experience, something that I guess is equivalent to what I would aspire to in the sense that it leaves you with a memory of a place that is impossible to forget and that is very special. I fell in love with that courtyard space and although I have never been back, it's forever in my head.

DB: Over the years, you have been involved with various exhibition designs and art installation projects. In your view, what role does art have in architecture?

RG: There is a very fluid relationship between art and architecture for me and I think the work of a number of artists has influenced me tremendously. Anish Kapoor is a contemporary artist that I admire greatly and whose work influences mine. Robert Irwin, Richard Serra, James Turrell, are all artists that are working to create experiences rather than objects. I am interested in this. They have really pushed the limits of boundaries in art and have created very ethereal conditions. There is a book on Robert Irwin's work called Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. This book was very inspiring for me because it describes how he questions things to the point where you are questioning the questions. I try to do this in my own work. This process requires that you research, you think, you work, you question, you work, you question, and you work. It's really a process and it's a lot of hard work. At the end, you can achieve something completely unexpected, something that has qualities that you would not be able to develop if you simply started with a preconceived notion.

DB: In 2006, your firm created a new venue for the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO). In that project you clad a 1936 warehouse in, reportedly, over 1 million Bisazza tiles depicting an image of a bamboo forest. What was the inspiration and intent behind this design?

RG: The inspiration behind the CIFO was the context. We really wanted this to be a refuge, an oasis within a very derelict, rough area of the city. The idea was to develop this tropical jungle. We then examined different ways of doing that. I think there were realistic pragmatic concerns with this project that we had to take into account that had to do with schedule. Everyone in Miami, as you know, is at a certain point intense about finishing projects for Art Basel in December. That was our deadline. I think one of the things that we considered was how we could achieve this jungle within a very limited amount of time. Our firm has an ongoing relationship with Bisazza. We have developed a collection for them and have worked on the design of their showroom space. The directors for Bisazza North America, Doug Harris and Lucia Schito, gave us all the confidence we needed. We felt very comfortable that they could execute the project in the amount of time that we had. They do beautiful work and were an obvious choice. What was then an interesting challenge for me was to develop a design that would not leave you with one singular impression but would allow you to see different things from different angles and at different distances. You should discover something new every time you come back to the building. We wanted to create an iconic image, but one that was always changing.

DB: Though the final design expression seems almost effortless, what challenges did you have to resolve in order to realize this design?

RG: The process of installing the mural at CIFO was amazing because it involved so many people and it was such a large effort. It was a very complex process that involved technology and involved the hand. It was a back and forth. We developed a design digitally, inputted that design using a program that assigns a Bisazza color and style to each pixel. There were over 100 colors assigned. Then mock ups were made and we looked at samples. This was an interesting process because the output from the digital program was often different than what our intentions were and other times there were great surprises that came of it. So there were corrections or push and pulls that were made in order to achieve what we wanted. The individual tiles were produced in Italy and shipped back here where they were assembled on trays by hand. The assembly process was very labor intensive as you can imagine. The design uses a module that is made up of ¾ inch tiles and we covered a façade that is approximately 40 feet high and 120 feet long.

DB: Aside from practicing architecture, you often lecture or teach at various universities including, UCLA, University of Virginia, Florida International University, etc. Additionally, you have been appointed by the Mayor and Commissioners of Miami Beach to chair the Miami Beach Design Review Board. Do you feel architects have a larger civic duty beyond just being designers?

RG: I think it is important for anyone, not only architects to get involved in their communities and affect them positively in any way that they can. For me it has always been important to work with organizations like the The Arango Design Foundation, The Wolfsonian Museum, and MOCA for example, that make a difference in the community and that strive to inform the general public about the importance of design. It is just natural; it is something I can't imagine not doing really.

DB: In addition to architecture, your firm creates award winning interiors as well such as the Murano Penthouse, a project that features a repeated use of teak wood. What was the inspiration behind the behind this design?

RG: The Murano penthouse utilizes teak because of the relationship to the water. I think that because parts of the space are very bright and airy and tend to reflect a lot of light and be about sky, we wanted a contrasting and grounding material like teak. Contrast is something that is often interesting for us to work with and is really part of the way that we can create situations that become impactful and experiential. The teak elements in this particular project flow from one end of the unit to the other and allow you to connect views and to make connections spatially. This is a very important design element.

DB: Some architects are very theoretical and analytical when designing while others are more pragmatic. What can you tell us about your design method?

RG: I think it is important for us to find a relevancy to the ideas we are interested in exploring, or rather explore ideas that are relevant. Our work is always grounded in reality. My interest is always to create something that will be used and will last.

DB: Many of your projects like the Indian Creek house, for example, seem to weave the architecture and the landscape together very seamlessly. What can you tell us about your views on the relationship between nature and the built form?

RG: I think that it's about a dialogue. I have always been interested in dissolving thresholds. I started exploring breaking down the envelope between the interior and the exterior during my Master's Thesis at UCLA and have continued to explore this in our projects. I am interested in establishing seamless connections between the architecture and the landscape. I think that the Indian Creek house is an exciting project for us because we are seeing many of these explorations realized. The client was just as excited as we were about developing outdoor living rooms. We use a number of elements there that dilute the thresholds. This allowed us to create spaces that are not inside nor are they outside, they are somewhere in-between.

DB: Your Florida projects really seem to take full advantage of the natural elements. What advantages and disadvantages do you encounter when designing specifically for Florida?

RG: Designing in South Florida is a challenge. It is interesting because you want to make connections to the exterior, you want to have conditions that explore surfaces that run from inside to the outside, and that are about the environment but the code in South Florida is ridiculous and prevents this. We have to think in a very creative way about how to achieve these connections. For example, we are designing a house where we want the whole wall to disappear. Dade County product approvals and impact resistant code requirements have forced us to think of the envelope as having two layers. Sometimes it is really about working within the accepted norms, using approved systems and finding ways to achieve what we want to achieve. It is complicated but I love Miami so we approach these challenges as opportunities to create new conditions.

DB: Given the opportunity to work on any commission of your choice, regardless of type or location, what would it be?

RG: I enjoy working on different scales of projects and different types of projects. It is always more about the specifics of the project, the connection with the client or the connection with the site. The ideal project can vary tremendously, maybe a meditative resort in an amazing landscape setting. We are currently talking to a developer that is going to be developing a hotel in Phuket (Thailand) and we are very excited about that possibility.

DB: With the recent downturn in the economy, there has been a slow-down in building that has impacted the local architecture and design community. Were you affected by this?

RG: Of course, the impact of the economy has affected everyone. I think we have been fortunate because we have been working with private individuals for the most part, instead of developers, so most of the work that we have been doing has been affected in some way but has not come to a halt as is the case with many development projects. We have been affected but not to the point, I think, that other architectural firms have been affected.

DB: What do you envision next for your practice?

RG: You know we are at a point where we feel great about the practice, I say we because my office is made up of a very strong group of architects and we work very closely together. I am fortunate to have an associate, Monica Vazquez, who is very focused and oversees a team of very creative project architects. There is a lot of mutual respect and reliance. We are all very excited about where we are at the moment because we are working on projects that are unique and that require a lot of design attention and we are working with clients that really want this type of attention. It is a very exciting time, it is a time when we are really able to sit back and look at the projects with as much intensity as we like. I think that we would like to be able to continue to do that, hopefully never taking on too many projects that would not allow us to be as careful and as intense as we believe is necessary.

For more information on Rene Gonzalez Architect visit: www.renegonzalezarchitect.com.