University of Miami Campus Tour and Architectural Archives

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University of Miami Campus Tour and Architectural Archives

The Merrick Memorial Building (Robert M. Little), University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, Florida Architect (1951)

Credit

Jan Hankowski

The University of Miami in Coral Gables was originally founded in 1926 on a 160-acre site donated by the city’s founder George E. Merrick, with an ambitious Beaux-Arts masterplan and preliminary designs of Spanish revival buildings by Paul Chalfin, Denman Fink, and Phineas Paist. Due to the devastating hurricane of 1926, followed by the Great Depression and then World War II, the university’s building campaign floundered until the post-war era when its first president, Bowman Foster Ashe, took advantage of the U.S. government’s new educational programs to launch on the twentieth anniversary of the university’s founding, a bold vision of a new modern campus.

Ashe hired Miami architects Robert Law Weed and Marion Manley to provide the university with a new master plan on the original site, though now the vision was a radical departure from the 1926 plan offering instead a flexible and functionalist approach that had never really been tested in university settings other than at Florida Southern College by Frank Lloyd Wright (1938) and at Illinois Institute of Technology by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1941). Its planning featured distinct administrative, educational, residential, religious, and recreational zones, separated by generous areas of landscaping. With covered walkways framing outdoor gardens and terraces, open galleries and staircases, and thin footprints that allowed for natural ventilation, the architecture also reflected the modernist and tropicalist sensibilities that were shaping Miami during the postwar era, becoming one of the region’s most important emblems. 
 
This tour will focus on several signature campus buildings, including the School of Architecture, the Merrick Building, and the Dooly Memorial Classroom Building, the Cox Science Center, and the Whitten Student Center. It will culminate at the Richter Library with a private tour of two extraordinary University archives: the university’s Special Collections, and the Cuban Heritage Collection. 
 
Allan Shulman, FAIA, LEED AP, Principal of Shulman+Associates, will lead the campus tour. Dr. Victor Deupi, Senior Lecturer at the University of Miami, will lead the trip to the architectural archives. 
 
Walking Tour (Tour starts and ends on the UM campus, participants must provide their own transportation.)
Thursday, May 30, 9:30–11:30am 

$45 
 

All tours will be submitted for AIA credits. 
 

Victor Deupi

Victor Deupi is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Miami School of Architecture where he teaches history and theory, design, and representation. He received a Bachelor of Science in architecture from the University of Virginia, a Master of Architecture from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught previously at Fairfield University, the New York Institute of Technology, the University of Notre Dame, the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture in London, and has been a “Visiting Critic” at the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech. 
 

Allan Shulman, FAIA, LEED AP

Allan Shulman, FAIA, LEED AP, is the Founding Principal of Shulman + Associates. He is an architect, author, editor and curator. He also serves as a Professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Allan's research focuses on themes of modernism, tropicality and urbanism. Published works include Building Bacardi: Architecture, Art and Identity, Miami Modern Metropolis: Paradise and Paradox in Midcentury Architecture and Planning; The Discipline of Nature: Architect Alfred Browning Parker in Florida; and as a co-author, The Making of Miami Beach: 1933-1942: The Architecture of Lawrence Murray Dixon; and Miami Architecture: An AIA Guide.

2024 National Symposium Miami: Streams of Modernity, Postwar to Postmodern

Join us in Miami and Coral Gables, Florida, from May 29 to June 1, 2024, and experience one of the country’s richest collections of mid-century and postmodern architecture. Entitled Streams of Modernity: Postwar to Postmodern, the 2024 National Symposium is a collaboration of Docomomo US and the Docomomo US/Florida chapter.