Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/603573
280 CULTURED Terence Riley and John Keenen first met in the early 1980s, when they were both architecture students at Columbia University. After graduating, they worked for various big-name firms including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Rafael Viñoly and in 1984, when Manhattan's affordable real estate lit their entrepreneurial fuse, they founded their own firm, K/R. "We rented a loft," recalls Keenen, "and figured we had enough work for six to eight months, so we quit our day jobs." The inventive, experiential work they've produced ever since spans a few continents and includes everything from master planning to interior design. As an adjunct to their practice Keenen continues to teach periodically, as he has done for the last two decades, at Harvard, RISD and Parsons while Riley's immersion in the world of architectural theory has been more institutional. In 1991, he joined the staff of the Museum of Modern Art and eventually became the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. For the next 14 years he stewarded groundbreaking exhibitions and was a key player in the process of hiring Yoshio Taniguchi to design MoMA's highly popular expansion. He subsequently moved to Florida where he headed the Miami Art Museum (now the Pérez Art Museum Miami) for six years before opening K/R's Miami satellite. "Our style of working is fluid," says Keenen, "and flexibility is always good in any business or partnership." The firm's relationship with Miami began in 1999 when curator Aaron Betsky introduced Riley to Craig Robins who then enlisted K/R to renovate the headquarters of Dacra, his real estate company, as well as his New York apartment. "Fifteen years ago you could see that K/R was making an important contribution to the neighborhood," says Robins, the force behind the redevelopment of Miami's Design District, "They defined it as a laboratory for creativity." Other commissions in the District followed, including the Garden and JBL buildings. But the most ambitious one to date is due for completion in 2017 with K/R playing both an architectural and overseeing role on the Museum Garage project, a mammoth structure with colorful, cartoonish and baroque façades. Described as an "architectural mural" that will also function as a multi-level car park, it is currently being designed by a handful of international architectural firms including WORKac, Jürgen Mayer, Nicolas Buffe, Manuel Clavel Rojo and Stefan Sagmeister. K/R has developed a reputation for creating spaces—institutional and residential—that hold their own when they are up against collections of painting and sculpture but never steal focus from them. They recently achieved that for Adriana Cisneros, the CEO of Cisneros Group, when they converted two raw spaces on South Beach into a 6,000-square-foot home for her family and art. They accomplished her brief—she wanted "a traditional Latin American house on the 8th floor of an apartment building"—and, as if to contradict the notion that architects don't decorate, they supplied all the furnishings. K/R's contribution to the Untitled Art Fair in Miami Beeach is another illustration of their firm's ongoing dialogue about art and architecture. Since the event's inception three years ago, the architects have designed the fair's tent, pitched on the beach, which this December will hold upwards of 100 exhibitors and stage several performances. As far as Miami's future skyline is concerned Riley feels that the popular reaction to Herzog and de Meuron's design of PAMM and Frank Gehry's New World Center concert hall has made developers more adventurous. And then there's the infectious awareness brought about by signature buildings from the likes of Zaha Hadid, Renzo Piano and Jean Nouvel. "John and I feel like we have new ground to break, compared to some of our peers," says Riley, out of a sense of adventure rather than competition. "For a couple of guys who've been doing this for a while, we have the same ambition we had in our 20's." The 100-acre riverfront Parque de Levante in Murcia, Spain, will include a new Museum of Modern Art and Design and sprawling public grounds.