Jackson Laurie

I am a writer based in Miami, Florida. I am not an architect. I do not work for a firm. I have no professional stake in the buildings I write about. What I have is a long-standing habit of paying attention to the built environment and a conviction that most writing about architecture is either too technical for a general reader or too superficial to be useful to anyone.

My focus is the American built environment, with Florida as the sharpest lens. Florida is an extreme case of almost everything that has happened to American cities in the last seventy years: rapid growth, car dependence, the destruction of older buildings, the failure of public housing, the rise and fall of the shopping mall, the politics of preservation. Writing about Florida architecture is a way of writing about American architecture in concentrated form.

I am particularly interested in the Sarasota School of Architecture, the Brutalist civic buildings of the 1960s and 1970s, mid-century modernism, and the forces — political, economic, demographic — that determine which buildings survive and which do not. I am also interested in the broader questions of urbanism: how cities work, why some urban environments are more livable than others, and what the physical form of a city reveals about the society that built it.

This site is where I publish essays, building notes, guides, and shorter pieces. I try to write for a general reader who is interested in the built environment but does not have a professional background in architecture. The goal is to be specific, to be honest about what I do not know, and to make the case that architecture is worth paying attention to.