The Thomas P. Murphy design studio conceived by Arquitectonica is a showcase for the School of Architecture at the University of St John. The distinctive roof level seen here protrudes 25 feet from the south facade to create a deeply shaded – and popular – terrace. Courtesy Alicia Vera
For four decades, Arquitectonica has cultivated what can be described as “steroidal modern” and applied it to huge waterfront developments and shopping malls in cities across the hemisphere. The firm’s work tends to be bulk and boast, avoiding subtlety in favor of the serenity of arena rock.
Perhaps that’s why Arquitectonica co-founder Bernardo Fort-Brescia can’t go beyond size when looking at the Thomas P. Murphy Design Studio building at the University of St John’s School of Architecture. He designed the humble, low-rise concrete building with his son and Arquitectonica’s lead designer, Raymond Fort. They both seem genuinely surprised by the buzz it has generated on campus. The exterior of the building is neo-brutalist and benefits immensely from a visceral appreciation of the material that breaks with the company’s penchant for gloss. The atmosphere inside is airy, if not downright lousy. Fort-Brescia, however, lives in its tiny proportions, as if its willingness to take over the commission were the result of a compensation mechanism, that is, a charity. “We rarely have projects of this size – that we love!” he says.
Covering 20,000 square feet, the Murphy Design Studio houses only about a third of the program’s 350 students, though that proportion will increase. Despite its size, the project is loaded with a meaning for a school historically aligned with the New Urbanism movement (founded in part by former Arquitectonica partner Andrés Duany). Under Rodolphe el-Khoury, who was appointed dean in 2014, the institution moved out of the shadow of New Urbanism, hired young instructors and invested in technologies such as robotic arms. With that in mind, the Murphy Design Studio is moving from building to being a recruiting tool. The architects – presumably under the direction of Fort, 31 – skilfully tapped the younger generation’s yen for a bygone age of “concrete monsters” when exposed formwork, bullish shapes and mean gray tones predominated. (Arquitectonica’s take on brutalism is a tribute act that resembles a polished and revered rendition of a radio classic.) El-Khoury even credits the design with a dramatic increase in freshman applications this year.
The interior is almost completely open except for a central sanitary core. The desks can be distributed on the floorboard in any configuration ordered along a 25 foot module as the number of students is expected to increase. Courtesy Alicia Vera
The Murphy Design Studio, which opened last fall, also started an expansion plan for the architecture school, whose campus will grow to nearly a dozen buildings on the southwest corner of Lake Osceola in the coming years. A continuous metal roof designed by New York and Boston-based NADAAA will unify the strange collection of structures, the surface of which flares and tapers at key junctions like boomerangs. Functionalist blocks, developed by Marion Manley, South Florida’s first female architect, for the return of soldiers after World War II and later converted into architecture studios, are the oldest of these, although the Bauhaus facade, like the St John Beach pastels, is replacement the 1980s. The centerpiece, however, is Léon Krier’s 2005 Jorge M. Perez Architecture Center, which is cool and retrograde and looks like it’s carved out of a giant cube of sugar. The planned removal of a street that the Murphy Design Studio has orphaned from its neighbors allows for a quad bike to be planted, further holding the campus together.
In the short term, the building has finally given the school what it has always been missing: an unrestricted open shed in which studios can be housed and a design culture can be promoted. The Manley buildings are good enough for administrative purposes – the el-Khoury office is particularly enviable, ventilated, and overlooks a small shaded courtyard – but the architecture studios are inhibiting. “There are a lot of walls splintering your studio,” says Germane Barnes, an architectural designer who has taught at the university for five years. “You could possibly have five or six students per bay and 10 to 12 students per studio. So when you make announcements, you have to stand between the doors to address everyone.” And because the jagged layout reduces visibility, the buildings can be quite insulating, especially for students who work late into the night.
Pinup and review areas are demarcated by red curtains, the strongest chromatic counterpoint to the predominant gray palette. Courtesy Alicia Vera
The Murphy Design Studio alleviates these problems. Working on a spacious 25-foot grid, the plan is bordered by thick, load-bearing concrete walls, with point pillars making the structural difference. (The longer two sides are glazed.) The solution to a shed may have been a foregone conclusion, but the architects also recognized that it should play an educational role. Concrete – “the building material of choice in South Florida,” says Fort-Brescia – was particularly conducive to this purpose and is used consistently for educational purposes. Fort highlights how the formwork on the single curved wall differs from the others. The boards of the formwork were laid vertically because “it’s easier to lay them horizontally. In this case you have to bend the planks, “explains Fort.” Such small teaching moments can only be expressed in concrete terms. “
The sharpness of the surfaces inside and out reduces the complexity of the design to heighten this need for instruction. The lack of false ceilings shows HVAC systems, and the glazed north and south facades, in which hurricane-grade panes of hurricane-grade glass are full-height interspersed with operable windows, provide a demonstration of cross ventilation. The buoyant roof overhead, reaching 18 feet in places and dropping to 9 feet when protruding over the south wall and providing a deeply shaded porch, makes the shape functional. “On the one hand,” explains Barnes, “you can draw a line on a piece of paper and indicate in the first few years that it is actually four inches thick, and on the other hand, you can articulate in the upper level.” Students how air circulation and mechanics work. “
Even the design flaws can be fixed for educational purposes. The theater’s red acoustic curtains delineate pinup and review zones, but have not been effective at reducing ambient noise. (They will be replaced with a more absorbent, but still red, fabric before the next term.) Placement of a modular glass conference room (by DIRTT) along the back of the building hindered circulation and collaboration and will be relocated.
In this vacated space, el-Khoury envisions a forum for creative combustion, in which students can gather for larger projects: “The building gives us this untidy vitality that the students cannot get enough of after two semesters.”
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