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

When Frank Gehry’s Stata Center at MIT opened three years ago, it got a lot of press, especially for its novel appearance. I wrote at the time [record, July 2004, page 61]: “It looks as if it’s about to collapse. Columns tilt at scary angles. Walls teeter, swerve, and collide in random curves and angles. Materials change wherever you look: brick, mirror-surface steel, brushed aluminum, brightly colored paint, corrugated metal. Everything looks improvised, as if thrown up at the last moment.” The Stata was even pictured in a Doonsbury comic strip, where a character calls it “pretty cool.” Photography: ©

Fractals are the Stata. No two places are exactly the same: “The lack of repetition animates the building.” Coffee and whiteboards seem to be everywhere, and people casually join discussions as they navigate their way through the plan: “You run into people you might not have seen in years. I get lost all the time.” Photography: © Roland Halbe Interiors provide a variety of spaces to gather. A voice of mild disagreement is that of Noam Chomsky, the linguist and political activist who is the Stata’s best-known inhabitant. Chomsky’s world isn’t fractal. It’s a conventional suite of offices. He says