Spear has brought wisdom, wit, artistry and intellect to bear at the world-renowned firm she helped found shortly after she earned her graduate degree. That firm, Arquitectonica, has embraced the world of design quite literally from the ground up – from the landscape at the Perez Art Museum Miami to the city skyline, from a building named the Babylon (now demolished) to a South Beach parking garage that invokes the hanging gardens of Babylon – as well as several buildings on the middle school campus: the main entry and gymnasium, science building and media center. Ransom Everglades selected her for the RE Alumni Founders’ Award for Distinguished Service to the Community in 2005.

Decades after her emergence as one of Miami’s most influential architects, she continues to immerse herself in environment-focused projects through Arquitectonica’s three “studios” that work under her guidance. She also makes time for engagement with her high school alma mater as a member of the Everglades Steering Committee. Her day job is to help build Miami’s history; in her free time, she seeks to preserve and highlight the history of the Everglades School for Girls.

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 Museum Miami. “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.
 
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 from my 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.”


Her interests had expanded well beyond architecture to encompass a broader, more holistic view of the ways in which design can change the built and unbuilt world. By then she had already launched a firm-within-the-firm, a design studio that focused on interiors and products (Arquitectonica Interiors + Products), then a second one to do architecture at a smaller scale (Arquitectonica Studio).

But as time went on, what absorbed her most of all was landscape. She enrolled in Florida International University’s master’s program in landscape architecture, and in 2005 she and Margarita Blanco founded ArquitectonicaGEO as a complement to the larger and faster paced (and burgeoning) architectural practice. In the last two decades, Spear has focused primarily on ecologically responsible landscape design, with forward-thinking designs that have shed new light on the possibilities of integrating nature and architecture. Among GEO’s goals is the making of more ecologically sound, socially engaged and economically invigorated public spaces without sacrificing aesthetics.

It almost goes without saying Spear is a fierce advocate for the natural environment and a constant and restless learner as she seeks answers to the many questions of survival and resiliency that confront not just Miami, but the world. “The most productive thing one can do,” Spear says, “is to add to the earth, add plants, add trees. It’s amazing how much pushback I feel if I quietly say: Maybe do not build it so tall, so dense? Maybe underbuild it? Maybe there should be more landscape? Maybe we should not build it at all: make a park or a garden or just wild?”

ArquitectonicaGEO’s work can be seen not just at PAMM and the Frost Science Museum, but on the campuses of both the University of Miami Lakeside Village and Florida International University, on the rooftop at Brickell City Centre and in the design of the PortMiami Tunnel – and there is more to come. “I began thinking about how ironic it is that the most experimental (and even often controversial) area of design is not ‘how big’ or ‘how tall’ but actually the preservation of the land and the landscape and how important it is to ask the most difficult questions,” she said.

Spear has been asking those difficult questions her whole life. But perhaps the sea change is that the more youthful “why not?” has evolved into a more informed and perhaps more sagacious, but no less wise question, which is “why?”

Beth Dunlop was the longtime architecture critic of the Miami Herald as well as the former editor of the magazine HOME Miami. She has written, co-authored or contributed to more than 40 books, among them two on Arquitectonica. She is the mother of Adam Farkas ’01.