Interior Design Hall of Fame

Arquitectonica splashed onto the design scene with an ensemble of apartment buildings and private residences that seemed to pave the way for Miami's resurgent glamour. Their now-legendary Atlantis condominium building, featured in the opening credits of Miami Vice, startled the design world with its audacious form and colors. Since then, Arquitectonica has become a firm of global stature with a professional staff of more than 180 people and offices in Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Manila, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Sao Paulo.

Founding partners Laurinda Spear and Bernardo Fort-Brescia, a husband-and-wife team, continue to put forward a sassy brand of smart postmodernism that blends functionalism with an emphasis on color, regionalist allusion, and energetic imagery. Their designs have been exhibited in major museums and institutions around the world, including a show focusing on their 57-story Westin Hotel/E Walk project for New York's Times Square, at the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

Overseas projects include mixed-use developments, resorts and hotels, retail centers and office buildings, a United States Embassy in Lima, Peru, an opera house/symphony hall, and several bank headquarters. Here in the States, Arquitectonica's projects span a similarly broad range. They include the Miami City Ballet studio and headquarters in Miami Beach, the Philips Arena in Atlanta, the American Airlines Arena in Miami, Bongos Cuban Cafe and Disney All Star Resorts, both in Orlando. Across the spectrum of their projects, Spear and Fort-Brescia discover intelligent ways to merge formal clarity and decorative wit, continuing to demonstrate--as they did at the Atlantis--that urban architecture falls short if it doesn't also know how to have a good time.

Spear, the mother of six and a marathon runner, has also developed designs at a smaller scale, including a line of laminates for Formica, textiles for HBF Textiles, hardware for Valli & Valli, watches and clocks for Projects and a line of wall coverings for Wolf-Gordon and architectural glass products for Skyline. She received her B.A. in Fine Arts from Brown University and an M.A. in Architecture from Columbia University. A 1978 recipient of the Rome Prize in Architecture, she has lectured widely and her work, as well as that of the firm, has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. Spear became a National Academician of the National Academy of Design in 2001.