Thanks to gifts from the first Momentum campaign, the challenge of creating a vibrant new center for the School of Architecture was handsomely fulfilled.

The assignment, as University President Donna E. Shalala would later recall, was somewhat daunting: to create a building “as brilliant and creative as the School of Architecture faculty.”

The School of Architecture’s Jorge M. Perez Architecture Center, with its domed towers, freestanding colonnade, buttresses, and half-moon windows, more than lives up to that challenge. Unlike any other building on the University of Miami’s Coral Gables campus, it is an up-to-the-minute structure reflecting timeless traditions—and serves as a perfect symbol of the school and its mission.

Jorge M. Perez Architecture Building

The facility is named for UM trustee Jorge M. Perez, a Miami developer whose 2002 gift to the first Momentum campaign helped make the center possible.

Designed by world-renowned architect Leon Krier, a leader in the influential architectural discipline known as New Urbanism, the 8,600-square-foot, $6 million Jorge M. Perez Architecture Center houses a state-of-the-art lecture hall that seats 144, an exhibition gallery, and a digital conferencing classroom.

The facility is named for UM trustee Jorge M. Perez, a Miami developer whose 2002 gift to the first Momentum campaign helped make the center possible. “When I saw the drawings for this much-needed architecture center, I immediately fell in love and knew that I was going to help it become a reality,” Perez recalls.

“I immediately fell in love and knew that I was going to help it become a reality.”

Jorge M. Perez

A key gift from the late Stanley Glasgow, a School of Architecture alumnus and former UM trustee, and his wife, Jewell, also helped transform vision into reality. Glasgow’s firm—Ferguson Glasgow Schuster Soto, Inc. of Coral Gables—is the architect of record for the center, and the building’s Stanley and Jewell Glasgow Lecture Hall recognizes their generosity.

Additional support came from the Marshall and Vera Lea Rinker Foundation, Inc. to name the building’s state-of-the-art digital conferencing classroom; the State of Florida’s Division of Cultural Affairs; Leonard L. and Jayne H. Abess; Thomas F. Daly; and Andres Duany and Plater-Zyberk, founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism.

“As plans for the building evolved, we realized that it would not only provide space for teaching, but would itself be a teacher,” says Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, dean of the school. “This building will stand for years as a living lesson on architecture and urban design.”