In Conversation: Chad Oppenheim

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The city is ready for civic-scale architecture. The donors behind these projects are more sophisticated now, and what is happening is a large influx of talent for civic projects: Herzog & de Meuron doing the new Miami Art Museum; Grimshaw designing the Miami Science Museum, Pelli’s Miami Performing Arts Center. Gehry’s [New World Symphony] concert hall in Miami Beach.

One of your more celebrated built towers is Ten Museum Park. How do you assess its impact on the Miami skyline?

People find it incredibly elegant, of graceful proportion, where a lot of the high-rises around it have been massive. It has a very delicate profile, is very small in its footprint and its vertical/girth relationship. I’m excited it has had a big impact; it has started people rethinking in terms of rezoning massive buildings.

Your own work excluded, what’s the one building no visitor to Miami should miss?

The Bacardi Building headquarters is incredibly elegant, with a Modernist [look combined with] a local flavor. And the Delano Hotel, as redone by Philippe Starck, delivers such a unique, powerful, experiential moment. The entire procession through this elemental space achieves maximum effect, enlightens the senses experientially. One of the projects we’re doing in Las Vegas is the new Delano Hotel, and one of the reasons we won [the commission], I think, is I have been so inspired by the original. It’s holy ground for me.

Of all your 20 or so projects in Miami, what’s your personal favorite?

The residence that we actually live in [Villa Allegra]. I designed it as a spec home and loved it too much to sell. It’s really the purest example of what we’re trying to accomplish in Miami.

Let’s talk about Cor, your high-profile green tower in the design district. Your press release describes this building as “revolutionary … the building of the future.” What are the green features that really set this project apart?

It’s a building where the architecture is fully integrated with the ecological ideologies. For example, with the wind turbines on the roof, it looks like a green building—whereas so many other sustainable projects just look like generic buildings.

The architectural and the ecological also fuse together in the building’s skin. A hyper-efficient exoskeleton shell simultaneously provides building structure, thermal mass for insulation, shading for natural cooling, enclosure for terraces, armatures for the wind turbines, and plazas on the ground level.

And the shifting in the patterns of the circular openings is intentional: It’s much more efficient to have diagonal gridding rather than vertical.

Rising 22 stories over the design district in Miami, Florida, Cube promotes its occupants to design their own domain with the possibility of connecting multiple cube modules vertically, horizontally, and diagonally in addition to creating double height volumes, garden voids, and cantilevered living environments.

The skin is also somewhat suggestive of a living, breathing creature…

It is organic in that there is no greater ecological entity than the human body, which has this organic perfection in dealing with climate. Our skin is so amazingly complex, and this skin is complex in its structure, its ecology, its urban gesture. It was not the intent, but it does somehow does evoke an organic life with its fluidity.

Walk me through your conversations with developers about green design. Is it an expected component of the design today, or do you still have to sell them on green?

We start with explaining why a green approach should be taken and then work to find an angle for the particular project.

With Cor, for example, we said [to the developer], “Because of how this building looks, you’ll get a tremendous amount of free exposure. So instead of spending $1 million in marketing, let’s put that money into the technology of the wind turbines, the solar generation of hot water, photovoltaics.”