The Rick Owens Flagship Oratory holds the corner of the northern plaza terminating the a new pedestrian path cutting through the Miami Design District. Its entrance is located within a semi-enclosed courtyard that provides a transitional space from the main plaza to the inner world of the Oratory. Engaging the plaza’s latent diagonal through the courtyard allows the Oratory to both define a boundary for the district while also providing a continuation of the promenade, drawing pedestrians up into its space.

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Moreover, the figuration of the central courtyard calls to attention certain formal ambiguities possessed by the Oratory, which appears to straddle typologies. Is the Oratory a centrally planned space with a corner bitten off? Or is its diagram perhaps a U-shaped plan in the process of closing-up? Or perhaps an axial space split and wrapped around a courtyard? Underscoring the indeterminacy of its form is a material interplay between fluid and stereotomic elements. Like the work of Rick Owens, the Oratory engages simultaneously the ancient and the contemporary. Brick walls and ferro-concrete vaults push and pull on one another, creating a spatial environment that is at once malleable and hard, stony and supple.

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