The fight over Genting's casino-fueled plans for the current site of the Miami Herald building has been thrown a hitch by an unlikely party: the Dade Heritage Trust. You see, they think that big brown and beige box which is basically at this point a glorified backdrop for giant Apple iPad banner ads, is worthy of being deemed a protected landmark despite being less than 50 years old.

The Herald, in a piece that rings of a certain "Yay, you think our old building is special" prideful tone, lays out the Dade Heritage Trust's argument.

The building is apparently an example of local MiMo architecture. This, despite the fact it was designed by a Chicago firm. The same firm that also designed the very similar (and now demolished) Chicago Sun-Times building. So, really how locally significant could the style of architecture be? Genting's plans may be a whole other type of ugly, but at least its ugly designed by Miami architects.
The trust thinks the significance the Herald has played in local affairs throughout the city's history should be considered. Though, that seems more like something best upheld in the current pages of the paper, and not in the building it happens to have been put together in.
It's "iconic."

For anyone who thinks this is some sort of anti-casino move on the part of the trust, think again. "Could this building be incorporated into a casino? Of course it can,'' planner and co-author of MiMo: Miami Modern Revealed Randall Robinson tells the Herald.

Slots in Dave Berry's old office? The Carl Hiaason Roulette Wheel?

Genting could even build around the site, and build a tower on top. Of course, Genting has bigger hurdles to overcome than preservation boards. Namely, the state legislature. If Genting is unsuccessful in bringing full service casinos to Florida, it could move to cut its losses and sell the property. Though, a historic designation for the Herald building could stymie any future, possible non-casino development plans as well.

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Gene R. Summers, an architect and developer who undertook the first major renovation of the historic Biltmore Hotel, reviving interest in downtown Los Angeles and helping to spark its revitalization, has died. He was 83. Summers, who retired to the Sonoma County community of Healdsburg a decade ago, died Dec. 12 of liver disease in a hospital near Sebastopol, according to his wife, Jacqueline.

A former associate of modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Summers and business partner Phyllis Lambert were planning to build a new hotel downtown when the Biltmore came up for sale in 1976. They bought the run-down Beaux Arts-style building for $5 million and spent millions more, reversing years of neglect.

They restored the hotel's ornate ceilings, which had been hand-painted and carved by Vatican artist Giovanni Smeraldi for the 1923 grand opening. Other changes reflected Summers' love of modern art: He furnished the grand lobby with Mies' iconic Barcelona chairs and filled walls with pop artist Jim Dine's heart lithographs.

"I recall with pleasure the design aesthetic that Summers and his business partner, Phyllis Lambert, introduced to the Biltmore — an historically accurate restoration, with an overlay of 20th Century design sensibility," said Margaret Bach, founding president of the Los Angeles Conservancy. "It was a daring and prescient project for its time."

During his 12-year partnership with Lambert, Summers also built industrial parks and renovated the Newporter Hotel in Newport Beach. Summers began his career in Chicago in 1950, when he was hired as a project architect for Mies. He worked with the influential German-born architect on a number of important commissions, including New York's landmark Seagram Building. In 1967 Summers joined the Chicago architectural firm of C.F. Murphy Associates, where his best-known project was the McCormick Place convention center on the Lake Michigan shore.

In the early 1970s Summers moved to California and formed a development company with Lambert, a Canadian architect and heiress of the Bronfman family long associated with the Seagram alcohol distilling company.

Lambert had experience with architectural renovation, so when Summers told her about the Biltmore, "she was all for it," Summers said in a 1987 oral history for the Art Institute of Chicago.

At the time, downtown L.A. was struggling. The Bonaventure had not yet opened. A few blocks away, the Biltmore's neighborhood at Fifth and Olive streets was in a sad state, with Pershing Square a magnet for derelicts and panhandlers who scared away the few tourists who stayed in the once-majestic hotel across the street.

The Biltmore "was sitting there almost empty and in very bad condition, but Gene was able to see what it could be," said Joseph Woodard, who was president of the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau when Summers and Lambert acquired the hotel; he later became the Biltmore's president. "He was also an exceptionally talented architect. He supervised every aspect of the work personally, from the design and construction to picking out the soap."

One of the first major improvements was adding a four-star restaurant, Bernard's, where the furnishings Summers chose included Mies van der Rohe chrome chairs. When the dining room opened in 1976, Times restaurant critic Lois Dwan called its decor "boldness that works perfectly with the oldness."

The three-year renovation earned the Biltmore a National Trust Honor Award in 1981 and top ratings from travel groups. The Biltmore's rejuvenation, Woodard said, sparked "a lot of the work that started going into downtown Los Angeles."

Lambert and Summers managed the Biltmore until 1984, when they sold it. Summers was born in San Antonio on July 31, 1928. He earned a bachelor's degree in architecture at Texas A&M and a master's in 1951 from the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he studied under Mies.

He spent several years designing furniture in France before returning to Chicago in 1989 to follow Mies' path and become dean of the Illinois campus' architecture school. He retired in 1993 and moved back to California, where he worked as a sculptor and painter.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by their daughter, Ali; as well as a daughter, Karen Lowe, and two sons, Scott and Blake, from his first marriage, to Ann Summers; eight grandchildren; and a brother, Wesley.

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Who knows what makes a great building? English Heritage, that’s who! Like any aesthetic response or any judgment about taste, a mixture of associational and direct factors is involved. Is this building powerfully articulate about the concerns of an age? Is it a touching memorial? Does it have intrinsic design qualities that lift it above the ordinary? Is it worth keeping? Shall we tell people about it? Who cares?

These questions are quite easily answered when architecture has been nicely patinated by the sanction of the past. The delicious, all-forgiving wash of history disguises many blemishes and, in any case, survival bias tends to mean that only the best of the old endures. So English Heritage confidently lists everything built before 1700.

But what of the modern period? Surely, unless we nurture a nasty nihilistic loathing of our own culture’s credibility, we must be able to identify quality in the here and now? When and how do we recognise in the best of the modern the same attributes that dignify the best of the past?

Half a lifetime ago in New York, when “high-tech” was journalism’s latest bright, shiny label and Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center was Manhattan’s outstanding new building, Tom Wolfe told me: “You know, 'Modern’ is now an historical style label. You should do a book about it.” In fact, he was doing one himself: From Bauhaus to Our House, Wolfe’s hilarious, perceptive, maddening, but not wrong, account of myopic modern megalomania was published in 1981. It seemed daring at the time.

Proof that “modern” has, indeed, become an historical style label is with us now. This week English Heritage has listed the Lloyd’s Building in the City of London and given it Grade I status. Thus, a ripe 20th-century architectural fantasy inspired at once by Buckminster Fuller’s daft techno-porn, Hanna-Barbera’s lovable Jetsons and Archigram’s unbuildable cartoon cities-of-the-future, joins York Minster and Montacute House, Somerset, as an official landmark, a repository of memory and an exemplary design.

There are several layers of meaning here. The architect of Lloyd’s is Richard Rogers, high-tech’s most persuasive front-man. He is elegant, cosmopolitan and bien pensant. Although, since he is half-Italian, we should say ben pensiero. For reasons buried in personal psycho-history, Rogers detests suburbs and has been in, not always intelligent, thrall to the design metaphors offered by the study of machinery. He has been rightly celebrated for Paris’s Pompidou Centre. With its guts hanging on its carapace, this is an absurdly irrational conceit, but a breathtaking one. And his new terminal for Madrid’s Barajas airport has brought new standards of civility to the discreditable zoo of air travel.

But recently, partly as a result of the offensively anti-social, vulgarian, ham-fisted over-development which is the Candy Brothers’ block of flats on Hyde Park and carries his name, Rogers’s reputation has been experiencing a little harsh revisionism. So far from being the liberal visionary with a River Café lunch table, he is a tool of oligarchs and money men. And Lloyd’s? So far from being a disciplined functionalist marvel of responsible, low-weight, high-efficiency architecture, it is expensive, indulgent, wilful, hand-crafted, ecologically wasteful and obsolete.

There are some who say that the extent to which Rogers ignored the client’s brief brought architecture into added disrepute, if such a thing were possible. Still, Lloyd’s has become an unignorable, although perhaps not yet much-loved, London landmark, a pilgrimage site for students and an evocative memorial to gung-ho finance. It is history, as the listing now proves.

From bold astonishment to the safety of the archives in a quarter of a century! This is an irony to savour, as modernists of all stripes were determined to slip the surly bonds of architectural history, but now find themselves getting trussed in an antiquarian muddle where finials and crockets and cornices mix ever so democratically with glass staircases, tensioned guy-wires and stainless steel pods. The Grade I listing of Lloyd’s may be inevitable. It may be controversial. What is certain is that it asks, and perhaps answers, important questions about what we value in buildings.

The listing of post-1945 buildings only began in 1987, arising from outrage about the greedy vandalism that saw Wallis Gilbert’s fine Art Deco Firestone Factory on the Great West Road demolished over a single weekend in 1980. This, to make way for bathos and mediocrity.

As a remedy and a rebuke, English Heritage’s Grade I listings from after 1945 offer us an architectural autobiography, a nation’s self-portrait emphasising its very best features. Chastening, then, that there are only eight of them after 66 years of building. The Severn Bridge and Jodrell Bank: great structures in the Brunel tradition. The Royal College of Physicians and Coventry Cathedral: mature Modernism. The Willis Faber Building in Ipswich, from Norman Foster’s early period when he was a radical innovator and not an international architectural brand.

What might be added? Certainly, Rogers’s Terminal 5 at Heathrow. A compromised execution, for sure, but proof none the less that sometimes this country can handle a grand project. James Stirling’s Engineering Building in Leicester University, a proud and unapologetic mid-Fifties revival of muscular Victorian redbrick. The Smithsons’ Economist Building in St James’s, a superb urban composition that loses nothing in comparison to its elegant 18th-century clubland neighbours. Or what about Future Systems’ Selfridges in Birmingham, a blink-making injection of ingenious vitality into a grim townscape?
You could also make persuasive claims for Colin St John Wilson’s British Library. Surely the last major library to be built? Or Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s Barbican? Imaginative dwarves dislike its grand gestures, but the Barbican remains the country’s most ambitious, boldest and most satisfying essay in large-scale inner-city renewal. And if the thoughtful adaptation of a mediocre Victorian building counts for anything, Dixon Jones’s wonderful enlargement of the National Portrait Gallery counts for a lot.

But Grade I quality does not have to be vast and expensive. Two recent designs, modest only in size and budget, have architectural qualities that deserve the accolade. The first is Thomas Heatherwick’s delightful East Beach Café in Littlehampton. The second is John Pawson’s Sackler footbridge in Kew Gardens, a thrillingly beautiful exercise in elegant restraint. In both cases, architecture enhances nature: this is an achievement Palladio would have recognised.

The Grade I listing of steel-and-glass Lloyd’s will have rubicund old bigots sputtering into their dog-eared copies of Vitruvius Britannicus. It will have Modernist diehards empurpled by the absurdity. But it proves one important principle: what matters in architecture is not whether a building is old or new, ancient or modern, but whether it is good or bad.
Making the grade...

Listing by English Heritage does not guarantee preservation; it is an official mark of recognition, the establishment’s rubber stamp of approved taste. About 600 post-war buildings have been listed, or 0.2 per cent of the national total. The first post-war listing was Sir Albert Richardson’s Bracken House of 1955-1959. Built for the Financial Times in the shadow of St Paul’s, it was extensively modified by Michael Hopkins between 1988 and 1991. To be Grade I Listed means a building is “exceptionally important”. Before Lloyd’s, only eight buildings (or structures) reached this status. The Severn Bridge. 1961-1966. Freeman Fox & Partners. Heroic steel and concrete. The Royal Festival Hall, London. 1949-1951. Sir Leslie Martin. The chief monument of post-War neo-Romanticism.

The Lovell Telescope, Jodrell Bank, Cheshire. 1957. Sputnik-era futurism. St Catherine’s College, 1960-1962. Arne Jacobsen. Polite Danish design for a new Oxford college. Coventry Cathedral, 1956-1962. Sir Basil Spence. A symbol, with borrowings from Le Corbusier, of a nation’s revival. The Royal College of Physicians. London. 1960-1964. Sir Denys Lasdun. Brutalism in the service of the professions. Kingsgate Bridge, Durham. Arup Associates. 1966. Acknowledgement of engineering. Willis Faber Building, Ipswich. 1972-1975. Lord Foster. A masterpiece of modern city building before Norman Foster became a professional genius.

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Esther McCoy is having a moment. The architecture critic and historian, who died in 1989 at age 85, is the subject of a smart Pacific Standard Time exhibition at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, building on McCoy's deep connections with Rudolph Schindler himself. The show is accompanied by a Getty-funded catalog, and early next year East of Borneo Press will publish "Piecing Together Los Angeles," an anthology of McCoy's essays on architecture.

What this turn in the spotlight will make clear to the public is what every architecture critic who has spent significant time in this city already knows: It was McCoy who first gave shape to the story of modern architecture in Los Angeles. She explained our best architects and their finest work to the rest of the country and the world. And she did it in a remarkably fearless and readable way.

Her best-known book, 1960's "Five California Architects," still reads like a fresh, argumentative guide to a creatively fertile foreign country, so patently does it assume — and with good reason — that its readers are in part confused and in part eager to be enlightened about this band of eccentric architects putting up flat-roofed houses on palm-lined streets. Reyner Banham, the great British critic and a dedicated lover of Los Angeles, said of McCoy, "No one can write about architecture in California without acknowledging her as the mother of us all."

To a large extent the McCoy revival has been engineered by the architectural historian Susan Morgan. With Kimberli Meyer, who oversees the MAK Center at the Schindler House, Morgan curated the exhibition, which has been extended through Jan. 29, and she edited the anthology and wrote its thorough, entertaining introduction.

McCoy always had a complicated relationship with the architectural and cultural establishment, which was based in those days almost exclusively on the East Coast. She was rejected by the Guggenheim Foundation when she was trying to get the research for "Five California Architects" off the ground in 1953. Los Angeles was more isolated from New York and Washington in those days than it is now; as a female chronicler of a West Coast avant-garde, McCoy was trying to climb a pole greased many times over.

And she had an independent streak that had a lot more to do with personality than gender or geography. As Banham put it, "She knew her stuff, was a real scholar, though she seemed to belong to no known academic faction or school of thought."

There is nonetheless a fierce consistency to her writing and her point of view, something that is immediately apparent in both the MAK Center show and the forthcoming anthology. Her goal was to analyze and humanize the breakthrough work of L.A. modernists — especially Schindler, in whose office she worked as a draftswoman from 1944 to '47.

And in describing the works of these architects McCoy was often describing Los Angeles, the young, wide-open and fast-growing city she had adopted after growing up in Kansas and spending her 20s in New York. "A Schindler house is in movement," she wrote in her first major essay on architecture, commissioned by editors at Direction, a small East Coast journal. "It is becoming."

In another famous and typically effortless phrase, she described California's Midcentury design as a "marriage between Walden Pond and Douglas Aircraft."

McCoy, who worked as an assistant to the novelist Theodore Dreiser in her Manhattan days (a relationship that continued when he too moved to California), also wrote fiction throughout her long career, selling short stories to the New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar and other magazines. But bringing attention to the underappreciated architects of the West Coast — who in 1960, when "Five California Architects" appeared, had none of the broad fame we now take for granted — became and then remained the focus of her work.

As she put it, in Los Angeles there was "an extraordinary amount of provocative architecture within easy reach."

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To tear down or to renovate: that is the question many owners of old houses ask themselves sooner or later. There is no simple answer. Bulldozing a Toronto dwelling and building again from scratch is expensive. But so is a thoughtful, top-to-bottom make-over by a good architect.

Not that everyone who hankers for a change in living circumstances starts with something top-to-bottom in mind. In the course of researching this column, I have met several people in brand-new homes who initially planned to do nothing more adventurous than knock out a few walls and raise a few low ceilings in their elderly houses. After totting up the numbers, and coming to grips with what was really needed to make their homes livable, however, they decided it wouldn’t be that much more costly to rip down the structures, hire architects, and start over.

But fortunately for admirers of the unshowy rhythms of downtown Toronto’s streetscapes, homeowners who might be able to demolish and put up something new often end up renovating instead. They like the feel and exterior look of the big family homes the Victorians and Edwardians gave us, even if some ideas of our ancestors about interior space have become woefully obsolete. The successful renovation of such places requires the talents of a designer with both respect for the past and a firm grasp of contemporary notions about comfortable modern living.

If a certain house I recently visited is anything to go on, Kyra Clarkson, who renovated it, is an emerging Toronto architect with a good handle on both local history and design ideas that sync with urban life nowadays.

This 3,000-square-foot, three-storey family home is not, on the face of it, something I would have thought worthy of salvation. It was put up around 1908 on a street of similarly ample, routine residences south of Forest Hill. The sturdy brick volume spreads almost to the edges of its double-wide lot, and turns a sober, slightly dour face to the street. At the rear a wing extends into the broad garden from one corner, giving the overall plan of the project an L shape. The house belongs to an era when middle-class people had live-in servants: That’s who slept in the small rooms under the dormer on the third floor, which is now reserved for guests of the current owners, a professional couple.

If I found it underwhelming, the two people who live there – one a “traditionalist,” the other a “minimalist,” the architect told me – liked the exterior, and wanted few changes made in its appearance. Ms. Clarkson’s one conspicuous external enhancement is a deck out back that extends along much of the house’s width.

Most of her energy went into the interior. Yet even here the surgery Ms. Clarkson performed has been subtle. She replaced the floors and created a light, open atmosphere throughout. And though she reduced the number of bedrooms from five to four, the old-fashioned general sense of the original scheme – the clearly articulated sequence of living room, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor, for example – has survived intact.

What makes this renovation interesting is not any single, large architectural move, since high drama was neither needed nor called for. It’s rather the accumulation of several modest gestures that bring the house into the 21st century while preserving what made it attractive to its owners. (One of these gestures – invisible, and perhaps not all that modest – was the installation of a geothermal heating and cooling system.)

In the state Ms. Clarkson found it, the kitchen was dark and gloomy. It is now bright, inviting and modern, as her clients, who love to cook, wanted it to be. The massive gas-burning La Cornue stove suggests that they take their cooking seriously indeed, so it’s good that they have a pleasant place in which to do it.

The old stairway up to the second and third levels, like the kitchen, was a cramped, unwelcoming feature of the house. For some reason Toronto builders of multi-storey residences, even relatively posh ones like this, often treated stairwells as tiresome things to be done as cheaply and meanly as possible. In her one really bold intervention, Ms. Clarkson ripped out the old flight of steps and replaced it with a floating stair that rises gracefully, like a well-lit corridor, through the volume of the house, lending it a unity it did not have before.

As Ms. Clarkson’s quiet but thoroughgoing modernization shows, even a fusty old dwelling like this one can be rescued from obsolescence without gutting its heart and soul.

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Architect Michael Graves has been named the recipient of the 2012 Richard H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame. Graves, the tenth Driehaus Prize laureate, will receive $200,000 and a bronze miniature of the Choregic Monument of Lysikrates during a March 24 ceremony in Chicago.

Graves is Founding Principal of the firm Michael Graves & Associates (MGA) and the Robert Schirmer Professor of Architecture, Emeritus at Princeton University, where he taught for 39 years. At Princeton, Graves reintroduced the principles of traditional and classical composition and brought a dedication to urbanism to a modernist curriculum. Receiving the Rome Prize in 1960 as a scholar at the American Academy in Rome, where he is now a Trustee, Graves was influenced by “the timeless grammar” of architecture that he has applied to his own work. Members of the Driehaus Prize jury commended his commitment to the traditional city-in its human scale, complexity, and vitality-as emblematic of a time-tested sustainability.

According to a release, in structures such as the Portland (Oregon) Public Services Building and Humana Corporation headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, Graves’ designs are characterized for their attention to human scale and dignity. The release notes that his concern for the character of his buildings extends to his interior design, the lighting, fixtures, and furniture that he regards as essential to the overall character he aspires to create.

In addition to his architectural work, Graves has also been involved with the design of numerous products. Some of these include the 5+ Collection of etched glass introduced earlier this year by Skyline Design, as well as a collection of door glass inserts, side lights and fan lights commissioned by ODL.

“Michael Graves has enhanced not just the architecture profession with his talent and scholarship, but everyday life itself through his inspiring attention to beautiful and accessible design,” says Michael Lykoudis, Driehaus Prize jury chair and Francis and Kathleen Rooney Dean of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. “The quality and scope of his work have enhanced how people work, live, and interact in public and private realms, making a profound impact on American life.”

Established in 2003 through the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, the Richard H. Driehaus Prize honors lifetime contributions to traditional, classical and sustainable architecture and urbanism in the modern world.

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Architect Gene Summers, whose flat-roofed lakeside McCormick Place building has been one of the city's most powerful expressions of modernism--and a target for open space advocates and a former mayor--since its completion in 1971, has died. He was 83.

The San Antonio-born Summers got his big break working with Mies van der Rohe from 1950 to 1966. One of the projects, Berlin's National Gallery completed in 1968 owed a debt, design wise, to Mies' Crown Hall at IIT. But as the next photo shows, the National Gallery--a dark, glassy building with a cantilevered roof--was also a near dress rehearsal for Summers' much larger McCormick Place, a building he'd design after leaving Mies' office and joining the Chicago firm C.F. Murphy Associates:

The McCormick Place project remains among the most controversial in history; a spectacular structure built in the wrong location. Summers' design replaced an earlier McCormick Place built in 1960 on the same site and designed by Edward Durell Stone. Stone's cinderblock of a building burned down in a five-alarm fire in 1967:

C.F. Murphy Associates was hired to design the replacement hall. But to save money, the new building to be constructed on the foundations of the old. Summers came up with several schemes, including an unbuilt scenario in which the Arie Crown Theater and the conventional hall were two separate buildings on the site. What was built--an overhanging, structurally-expressive roof atop a dark glass box---was a far cry from the previous McCormick Place. Summer's building was graceful, forceful, modern, and Chicago.

But it was still on the lakefront, earning the unofficial title "The Mistake on the Lake." In an Art Institute of Chicago oral history, Summers said he tried to get Mies involved in the building's design, but architect told him, "Gene, I wouldn't touch that thing is the site was the Acropolis and the building were the Parthenon. Controversy I don't need at this time in my life." A young Helmut Jahn worked on the design. He'd later run the firm Charles F. Murphy started.

While in office, Mayor Richard M. Daley publicly ruminated twice about tearing down the convention center, calling it a "Berlin Wall" that created a barrier along the lakefront. And it does, although a more public use for the structure--now that McCormick Place has expanded into a series of larger buildings to the west--would alleviate that.

Summers led the design of Malcolm X College, 1900 W. Van Buren, before leaving C.F. Murphy Associates in 1973. He would wind up doing a range of things including develop real estate, restore Los Angeles' Biltmore Hotel, move to France, then return to Chicago to head IIT's College of Architecture from 1989 to 1993--the position his mentor Mies held 40 years earlier--before moving to California.

In that Art Institute of Chicago oral history, Summers said McCormick Place was the building of which he was the most proud. "[I]t was done under such trying conditions," he said. "To have pulled it off under those conditions, that was something." Even Mies, not long before his own death at age 83, sent a good word to Summers about the building taking shape on the lake.

"The structure was up and he was sick," Summers said. "He had [his companion] Lora Marx call. Lora called me one Monday and she said, 'Mies asked me to drive him by McCormick Place. We did, and he just wanted me to call you to say he thinks its a good building.' "
 

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Earlier this year I was asked to join the accessions committee for the Architecture and Design Department of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It seems it was an opportune time, as the museum is making some exciting changes, most notable of which is a new expansion of the museum itself. The expansion project will double the existing gallery space to 130,000 square feet, and will also heavily modify the existing galleries to differ in scale, materials and lighting specifically designed to showcase a range of art, from photography to installation, video, painting and sculpture.

From my perspective, the most exciting aspect of the expansion is how it will integrate into the surrounding city. There will be multiple added entrances which will feature some unique galley set-ups designed to blur the edge between the city and museum. The building introduces a façade on Howard Street that will feature a large, street-level gallery enclosed in glass on three sides, providing views of both the art in the galleries and the new public spaces. The work inside will be visible from the outside even when the museum is closed.

Public circulation between the museum and the city will be enhanced through the creation of free ground-level galleries, new entrances that make the museum accessible from every direction, a central public gathering place, and more extensive routes of public circulation. The use of glass throughout the building, as well as the creation of several outdoor terraces and a new sculpture garden, further serves to open up the museum and connect it to the city.

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Architect Elmar Tampold, 91, is selling his modern house at 16 May Tree Rd., in Hoggs Hollow, a remarkable house I recall visiting with his son, Thomas, soon after we’d both graduated from architecture school. I was envious of Thomas, as he’d designed the house with his father and it not only turned out well, but the experience was positive for both of them. In painful contrast, my parents had just moved into a house in British Columbia that I designed, sort of, and the results didn’t make them, or me, very happy.

Thomas’s father was a well-known architect, and with a partner, John Wells, established a firm in 1959 that designed more than 1,000 buildings. They eventually had offices in Halifax, Montreal and Toronto. The firm specialized in designing university residences, including the notorious — at least for a time — Rochdale College on Bloor Street. Less controversial and enduring today as an elegant address a few blocks farther east is The Colonnade. Tampold Wells designed this homage to Le Corbusier with Gerald Robinson; it was completed in 1964.

“His friends couldn’t understand why he built a new house when he was in his sixties,” Thomas says. “But he lived in the house for more than 30 years, so he won that argument. I worked on the design with him after I graduated. It was a wonderful coming together for us. Being alone in it after his wife died is difficult, though.”

My father wasn’t an architect and even if he had been, I don’t know if we would have agreed on anything aesthetic. Unlike my childhood, Thomas and his sister grew up with a Scandinavian sensibility at home. His father was from Estonia, and this commitment to design on a day-to-day basis was not your usual WASP idea of style being regulated by practicality and budget, not refinement. “It was a different way of looking at things than most people I grew up with,” Thomas says. “It was always important how things looked, and to understand buildings in a total sense, of all the components that needed to make them work.”

It’s not that my parents didn’t try to instill their good values in me, it’s just that talking about what made cutlery well designed was not a dinner-table topic.

Thomas and his parents were in design sync. When I arrived back in B.C. filled with ideas about modern architecture, I confronted a mother who thought I’d been learning how to design the best Cape Cod house, and a father who thought I’d learned something about how to save money on heating and air-conditioning.

“The house is still interesting to me, and I’m more aware of the influences now than I was then,” Thomas says. “There’s a strong Bauhaus and Alvar Aalto contribution, and the floor plan is particularly interesting. It’s quite Adolf Loos. Like many of Loos’s houses, it has a similar footprint on each of three floors, but each floor is very different spatially. As well, the rather mask-like front the house presents compared to the other perspectives is intriguing” (see it at mls.ca, # C2207349).

The design for my parents’ house didn’t look like Thomas’s place, but it came from similar influences. However, the house my parents realized from my plans was embarrassing. (I was thrilled it was in B.C. and none of my classmates could see it.) When I arrived for my summer break 35 or so years ago, the house was already under construction and I could have driven right past it, as it didn’t resemble my plans: “We had to make a few changes for your mother,” my father said. “And to make it more practical for me.” Changes like … the list is endless. They sold it 18 months later at a profit (this being the proof their version was better), and it was never referred to again.

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The weather, architecturally speaking, continues to be cloudy in Spain. Caught in the aftermath of a burst housing bubble and facing a new era of slashed budgets and austerity measures, the country, which had been transformed into Europe's architectural playground over the past few decades, has been transformed again into a landscape of canceled projects and laid-off architects. But in Pozuelo de Alarcón, a northwestern suburb of Madrid, the skies look clear from the offices of A-cero, an architecture studio that is bucking the trend by breaking the traditional mold.

Founded in 1996, A-cero has made its name specializing in high-end, single-family residences, an emphasis almost unheard of on a continent where most architects aspire to design public buildings and commercial developments.

Closely associated with its co-founder and majority owner, Madrid-born architect Joaquín Torres, A-cero counts among its clients everyone from former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González to bullfighter Francisco Rivera Ordóñez. The firm, where Mr. Torres's business partner Rafael Llamazares is a principal, is best-known for creating luxury houses for the football players of Real Madrid. La Finca—a gated community not far from the studio's offices, with elegant limestone villas designed by A-cero—is home to several players, including Portuguese-born superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, and team manager José Mourinho.

Mr. Torres, 41 years old, is something of a star himself in Spain, with his own television show called "Supercasas," in which he and a TV crew drop in on some of his celebrity clients. The hype may be good for business, but it doesn't do the actual buildings justice. A-cero's unique emphasis has created a stunning body of residential work that manages to resolve one of the great stylistic divides of modernist architecture.

Critics and acolytes distinguish between the early and late work of the pioneering French-Swiss modernist Le Corbusier, whose austere villas from the 1920s, like Villa Savoye outside Paris, seem a world away from his primitivist, sculpted-concrete work from the '50s, such as the government buildings he created for Chandigarh, India.

A-cero's villas, which seem to combine the geometric flow of early Le Corbusier with the textural flourish of his later work, also demonstrate a keen eye for the simple grandeur of expensive materials, like stone, that characterizes the early work of Mies van der Rohe.

The firm's synthesizing riff on the history of modernism is gaining respect among Spain's architectural community, and commissions are coming in from places as diverse as Dubai and Beirut, where A-cero is building a number of luxury homes. "I must admit that 2011 has been a great year for A-cero," says Mr. Torres, speaking this fall at his office. In spite of the real-estate crisis, the firm has launched a series of prefab houses and opened a Madrid furniture showroom, which highlights its increased interest in customizing clients' interiors.

The symbols of Spanish architecture's recent boom were, almost without exception, great public structures like Seville's Santa Justa train station (1992), built by Cruz y Ortiz Arquitectos, and Musac (2005), a contemporary art museum in León, built by Mansilla + Tuñón. But high-end private homes have been conspicuously absent from most portfolios of the country's greatest architects. "They thought it was a low level of architecture," Mr. Torres says of his peers. "They thought it was more important to do official buildings, like museums."

A-cero, which now includes a staff of around 80 in offices in Spain and the Middle East, tends to avoid architectural competitions. Instead, the studio chooses to work closely with private developers, like Procisa, their collaborator on La Finca and their neighbor in the development's industrial park, where A-cero-designed glass-cube offices are set off by external stairwells of swirling concrete.

La Finca's security-conscious community, where houses come with servants' wings, is a new idea in Spain, and local real-estate professionals regard it as a great success. Construction began in earnest over the past decade, and more than half of the 180 planned homes have been built. The resale value of finished homes is stable, says Marbella-based realtor Kristina Szekely, president of Kristina Szekely Sotheby's International Realty, a firm specializing in luxury Spanish properties. On her books, she currently has a 1,500-square-meter La Finca villa on a 5,000-square-meter lot, for an asking price of €9 million.

Some of the houses are designed from scratch, although many are built according to studio-generated templates. As it turns out, the Real Madrid players like the ready-made versions. "Football players are not very creative," says Mr. Torres, who first began working with athletes after a chance run-in a decade ago with former Real Madrid star Fernando Hierro at a Madrid clothing store. "When they see a design, they want to copy it."

Merche Gracia, however, built her home from scratch. "I moved to La Finca two years ago," says the 36-year-old, who relocated from a smaller home nearby with her husband, the general manager of a technology company. Their 900-square-meter, single-story house includes several A-cero custom designs, including the dining table and the couple's bed. The 3,500-square-meter lot requires two gardeners, and the couple has two live-in maids. Although the development's homes blend together beautifully, the residents keep a respectful distance from each other. Ms. Gracia says there is no real sense of community.

"We all know the people who live in each house," she says. "But there is no close relationship."Projects like La Finca and other new villas in nearby areas have brought A-cero closer to Spain's architectural establishment. "At the beginning, I felt separate," says Mr. Torres. "But not anymore—now we know each other." The studio's name, which means "at zero," recalls the fact that Mr. Torres and his partners started with nothing. Now, they seem to have everything.

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