The Miami-based architect, who heads Oppenheim Architecture + Design, initially made his reputation with for-sale multifamily projects that combine a sleek Modernism with the tropical (and hedonistic) atmosphere of their surroundings.
BR: Chad, 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? CO: 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
BR: Chad, in addition to designing Ten Museum, you’re one of its developers as well. From a purely design perspective, what are the pros and cons of having an equity stake in a building? CO: When I see a phenomenal opportunity, a location that hasn’t been tapped, and I can put together a proposal for a project that takes advantage of this, it’s like an actor creating his own vehicle—like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon writing Good Will Hunting so they could star in it. [Having an equity stake] gives us a better opportunity to create great architecture as it
Pink Floyd was playing on the loudspeaker of the ferry transporting us over the Rio Napo into the 2,700-square-mile Yasuni National Park in the Amazon basin in Ecuador’s El Oriente region. We had missed the previous ferry after making hours of slow progress over rutted roads through a largely denuded countryside, then had to kill an hour in a shoreside scene of extreme informality—hot sun, muddy, littered paths along the river, lazing dogs, scattered houses, a little shop, and a dirt parking lot for waiting vehicles. The scene on the other side, however, was more like Guantanamo. From the dock,
The roadways slashing through the rain forest instigate both extraction and attraction, becoming the medium for still larger territorial reorganization. As roads are built, forest is cleared to make way for three rows of agricultural plots, each 820 by 6,562 feet, creating a space 7.5 miles wide and, in aggregate, hundreds of miles long, a vast linear settlement occupied by colonos from elsewhere in the country—well over a quarter million have poured into Oriente since the discovery of oil. Much of this is pasture land: rain-forest soils are a poor basis for conventional agriculture, and clearing the jungle dooms the
At first, it's easy to mistake the Manhattan office of Peter Marino for an art gallery. The award-winning architect has chosen his sleek, white-walled workplace as the venue to discuss his 10 favorite buildings of all time.
Since opening his Sydney office in 1969, the Australian architect has designed the kind of buildings the world needs most: economical, energy-efficient, graceful, small structures.