Glavovic Studio team photo. Image courtesy of Glavovic Studio

Born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa, architect Margi Nothard uses her global heritage and upbringing as a keystone to leading her Florida-based practice Glavovic Studio. A practice whose values stem from community-based engagement, socially conscious designs and environmental stewardship, Nothard has helped transform South Florida. Through her work in urban planning projects, affordable housing, public art projects, and commercial projects, the studio has made a lasting impact in Florida. Leading her firm for twenty years, Nothard's enthusiasm for social change through good design has allowed her and her team to works like the Young Circle Arts Park and the Kennedy Homes.

For this week's Studio Snapshot, Nothard shares her experiences of running a firm and what has changed over time. According to Nothard, "I was told after graduating to go somewhere where I could make a difference." After starting her practice 1999, Glavovic Studio has established itself as one of Fort Lauderdale's most impactful architecture studios. 

How many people are in your practice? 

We have 10 people, including architects/designers and administrative staff.

What prompted you to start your own practice?

It never occurred to me not to have my own practice. After finishing university in South Africa, I sought out SCI-Arc for graduate school, with the intention of surrounding myself with the most innovative and creative educators and thinkers. This foundational experience affirmed and fostered my feeling that architecture should always be a tool of engagement and change. While a student, I worked for Tom Buresh and Danelle Guthrie, Frank Gehry, and Laurie Hawkinson and Henry Smith-Miller. Each of these practitioners took risks and innovated, and their work is identified by its connection to an architecture of change and its impact on the urban fabric.

How did you come up with the name Glavovic Studio?

Glavovic is my birth surname and speaks to my roots and global origins. I am proud to be an American citizen, with an African heritage—born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa, with grandparents from Croatia and England. I am a citizen of the world.   

What are the benefits of having your own practice? Staying small?

Our goal is to use architecture as a tool to impact and address urgent issues, and having my own practice allows me the flexibility I need to select projects based on this criterion. Glavovic Studio doesn’t have one silo of “bread-and-butter work” and another for work that is meaningful. Every project we do is meaningful to us in different ways.

We designed our first affordable housing project for artists in 2001 with Artspace, a not-for-profit developer for artist housing. This entailed working with artists, the County, Artspace and the local historical neighborhood. Eighteen years ago, we had to educate people about what affordable housing really meant, who the residents would be, how a market rate project could co-exist with an affordable project, and more. During this period, I was able to supplement the firm’s income by teaching. The benefit of being the decision maker is to be able to drive and prioritize issues and work towards goals, to not be afraid to take risks and to remain engaged consistently. Almost two decades later that is still the case, I feel.

As the leader of the firm, I have also been able to make choices about the kind of firm I want Glavovic Studio to be. We embraced technology early on, leveraging digital production and skilled studio employees to compete for large projects in the public sector, aligning the studio pedagogically with the opportunity. Throughout the years, we have consultants who were established and provided extraordinary skills outside of the studio, from IT Consultants, to artists and graphic designers. We collaborated with teams and engaged in a discourse about architecture without considering any limits of size of practice. Size really doesn’t matter anymore because the nature of collaboration has changed completely. This means that we compete for projects of all sizes.

What have been the biggest hurdles of having your own practice?

The biggest hurdle, and the biggest fear, always, is simply money. A small practice generally works with much smaller margins than a large one, and we always worry that something might happen that will affect our cash flow. I have been able to maintain a practice during times when the economy was challenged by maintaining a small but extraordinary group of dedicated staff.  

Intellectually, the limitations of a smaller practice are the risk of not hearing counterpoints/other ideas. There must be a considered effort to bring in alternate points of view and determined strategies to remain relevant in the global cultural conversation.

What do you want your firm to be known for?

Always, always, my priority is that we are known for trying to make a difference through architecture. To be able to design an architecture that impacts the human spirit, that testifies to the humanity of the collective, that demonstrates respect and provides dignity for everyone, that shows how to celebrate the earth—these are also things that we always try to do. We believe there should be modesty in this approach though—an understanding that precisely because architecture has such power, we should try to wield it with humility.

Intellectually, the limitations of a smaller practice are the risk of not hearing counterpoints/other ideas. There must be a considered effort to bring in alternate points of view and determined strategies to remain relevant in the global cultural conversation.

Where do you see your firm in 5 years?

We currently are working with a major foundation, Healthy Housing Foundation (part of the Aids Health Foundation), to explore architectural solutions to the humanitarian housing crisis in the United States. With this, we are currently exploring strategies for developing a housing model that is scalable. We are designing two pilot projects in Florida and California. Within the next five years, we will have evaluated new construction options, including modular and conventional micro-unit high-rise and mid-rise options that consider long-term dignified resilient solutions for residents currently struggling with housing affordability in new regions of the country. This is a major priority for Glavovic Studio, and we are in the process of expanding our studio to Los Angeles to support this effort. We are also focused on expanding opportunities for access to art and culture in public spaces, by working with artists, museums, and private clients.  

Finally, resilient solutions at all levels of design and innovation must continue to be inevitable in our work. We practice in a delicate and vulnerable ecosystem, as well as one of the most cost-burdened regions in the country. We need to have expanded opportunities for well-designed resilient architectural solutions for the public in the next five years.  

Do you have a favorite project? Completed or in progress?

No, but I enjoy the trajectory of learning from all our projects. The range is large—from ArtsPark, Young at Art Museum, Girls’ Club, Kennedy Homes, the Magic Leap headquarters, the Mending Wall at the Boca Raton Museum of Art to Healthy Housing Foundation Fort Lauderdale. But the common link is that they all explore and respond to the issues in this region, and beyond. 

How has Florida, specifically South Florida, influenced your work and design aesthetic?

I grew up in Durban, South Africa where the culture, climate, and environment permeate every aspect of the architecture. Within the urban fabric, there was always a juxtaposition of materials and landscape, affirming a sense of place and origin. Much of the vernacular architecture of South Florida includes deep overhangs, porches, and shaded balconies. The architecture explores ways to manage the interplay between the sun and the building envelope. Our work here continues this exploration, developing a strong architectural idea that addresses the larger site and urban context, while simultaneously exploring the relationship of the skin of the building as a “sieve,” a virtual scrim of varying degrees. The brise soleil that we are currently designing for the HHF project moderates the amount of sun entering the building and adjusts depending on the orientation, thereby keeping costs down and saving energy. At Girls’ Club, the scrim is an eco-resin panel covering the entire building and serves as a beacon to let passersby know that a cultural institution for women’s art is located on an otherwise nondescript street.  

Much of the vernacular architecture of South Florida includes deep overhangs, porches, and shaded balconies. The architecture explores ways to manage the interplay between the sun and the building envelope.

We have also employed ventilated facades (Young Circle Visual Arts Building) and the idea of the Florida Room (Healthy Housing Foundation)—traditional architectural tropes as tools that reflect the architectural heritage of Rudolph and McKirahan, though in contemporary, resilient materials and with a lower carbon footprint. 

With your experience working on affordable housing projects, what do you think are key guidelines architects and developers should consider when designing these homes? Any examples or favorite projects that accomplish this?

The phenomenon of NIMBY-ism is something that is well known. Many are fearful of attempts to integrate sustainability, affordability, transit, culture and equity. But to provide livable downtown cores that are available to all people is also to ensure long term economic success of urban neighborhoods.  

With the Dr. Kennedy Homes project, we initially received negative feedback from a segment of the residents of the Historic District, which was disguised as opposition to the removal of existing structures. Once built, though, the crime rate has reduced, the property has a waiting list more than 500 people, and the neighborhood has embraced the project and hosts the civic association meetings in the community spaces. 

We find that it helps during a difficult approval process to keep the focus on the ultimate client—the future resident. We always try to remember that we are working to design buildings that provide beautiful, dignified and affordable places to live for people who may not have had access to housing. This carries us through challenges. At the same time, the public is also an important constituency and our projects always try to go beyond the immediate program and provide places that are urban amenities. We know that our projects have the power to improve the lives of many.

The firm showcases its dedication to social issues and environmental stewardship. Do you think enough firms practice this? What influenced Glavovic Studio to focus on these design values?

Our dedication to solving social issues and environmental stewardship seems obvious, but it is not something I deliberately set out to do. It is just part of the fabric of who I am and how I think.

My father has been an enormous inspiration to me. His doctoral thesis on wildlife law in South Africa was seminal in the development of environmental law and policy in the country. His endearing and deep respect for the environment and quiet persistence about the value of nature permeates my psyche and encourages me to seek to create experiences in architecture that are profound (and often achieved with minimal means).  

My influences include my connection to the African continent, the respect for the environment there (where stewardship is taken very seriously), my belief that everyone is part of a collective, and the feeling that anything can be achieved with a bit of resourcefulness.

There is no question that we all need to be working on solving the housing crisis. It is a fixable problem.

Can you talk to us about the Boca Raton Museum of Art, its design progression, and its relationship with the community?

The Boca Raton Museum of Art is an anchor institution in South Florida. With Executive Director Irvin Lippman at the helm, there has been a thoughtful and thorough consideration of the museum’s place in this community: from the inspired exhibition programming to how the museum as a building faces its public. This is where Glavovic Studio came in. The museum was keen to reimagine its exteriors in order to become a more prominent and visually pleasing landmark on its heavily trafficked corner of Boca Raton. The Boca Raton community sees the renovation as a signifier of a new start for the downtown. For me, it is a demonstration of how a very small project can be leveraged for great impact.  

A sliver of land on Federal Highway was envisioned as a space to be captured to create a new way of seeing the museum. We inflected the interior programming and sculpture garden into this new space, curating a series of physically and visually accessible spaces for the public that linked the sculpture garden on the north to the entrance of the museum on the southeast corner with a 12-foot-high plinth taken from the existing building base. We designed a 500-foot-long indigenous landscape of undulating organic grasses and oak trees, reminiscent of a hammock into the Promenade to incorporate spaces for artwork, seating and lighting.  

We designed Mending Wall, a moveable art commission, to create a strong entrance element (where the loading dock used to be) to denote the front of the museum. It includes a lit-from-within aluminum and polycarbonate sandwich of 12’ x 80’ slats.   

Mending Wall, named by the museum as an ode to Robert Frost’s poem of the same name, contemplates the collective and the individual. The two gray colored slats moderate from west to east, becoming lighter until they are rendered as polycarbonate and then polished stainless steel. Through the gaps in the panels, bright yellow permeates, a strong and vibrant color, unifying the experience. The one and the whole are simultaneously experienced.  

What is the best advice you’ve been given during your career as an architect? What is the best advice you would give to firms just starting?

I was told after graduating to go somewhere where I could make a difference. That is part of why I decided to open my firm in Fort Lauderdale. It may not be an obvious place for a firm like mine, but I feel like I’ve been able to have an incredible impact through my work here.

My advice to young practitioners is always this: Find a way to do what you love. 

If you could describe your work/practice in three words, what would they be?

Engaged. Relevant. Creative.