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"View Slideshow\n\nMy mailbox is full all the time,\" Alexander Gorlin says. \"The mailman thinks it's the official building mailbox.\" What is the cause of this confusion? The architect lives in an apartment he designed for himself in a building he designed that also bears his name: The Gorlin, one of three apartment towers that rise from the blocks of town houses at Aqua, Craig Robins's posh Miami Beach development (see Architectural Digest, November 2001). \"What's it like to design a building and have an apartment in it and have your name on it?\" the architect asks, jesting, with his typically irrepressible energy. \"It's like a hat trick.\"\n\nThe Gorlin presented several challenges to its designer, which he solved\u2014both in the building and in his apartment\u2014with a shrewd mix of old-school modernist thinking tinged by the surreal.\n\nThe enormous sweep of the view presented challenges for the interior design, as the architect discovered.\n\nAqua occupies the southern tip of Allison Island, which splits Indian Creek just behind the narrow, northern stretch of Miami Beach. The town houses are designed by a number of sought-after architects following a plan developed by Duany Plater-Zyberk Company, the leading theorists and practitioners of the New Urbanism. The three towers (each taking the name of its designer) line the eastern edge of the island, right on the water, but The Gorlin is in the favored position: at the prow of the island, looking down Indian Creek to uninterrupted views of South Beach, Biscayne Bay and the city of Miami beyond.\n\nSounds good on paper, but in designing the building, Gorlin confronted a big problem right away. \"How do you have the view when you have the sun right in your face?\" Realizing that windows in line with the fa\u00E7ade would just become portals for glare, Gorlin set the entire southern exposure of The Gorlin behind deep balconies fringed with an additional band of louvered metal brise-soleils\u2014the whole extending about 10 feet from the fa\u00E7ade. This overriding functional imperative was then blended into the formal expression of the building; eschewing an Art D\u00E9co reference, the architect chose what he calls \"a rigorously modern building in which there's a layering of planes to give a contrast of shadow and light.\"\n\nWith the sun tamed, the enormous sweep of the view still presented some challenges for the interior design, as the architect discovered when he began to fit out his own apartment on a high floor. Looking out, the balconies and brise-soleils that cut the light so well also divorce the spaces from the foreground, giving one the impression of floating over Indian Creek among the white Miami clouds. \"The view is so overwhelming that I felt there was some need to anchor the space with color and texture.\"\n\nGorlin chose a decidedly playful and surreal palette to achieve those ends. The theme is established immediately in the entrance hall, where visitors are met by light blue walls (the sky), gray limestone flooring (the earth) and\u2014between the two\u2014brash paintings and a tall, strange, undulating fiberglass piece by Judith Niedermaier. As you turn to the right, drawn by the modified view, a few steps lead you away from the master suite and guest room and into the heart of the apartment\u2014\"a true loft space,\" Gorlin says, with living, dining and kitchen in one.\n\nGorlin chose \"a rigorously modern building in which there's a layering of planes to give a contrast of shadow and light.\"\n\nHere, Gorlin's surrealist tendencies are given full rein; the space is \"anchored,\" but in a most perverse manner. A 12- foot-long sofa lines one wall, under an overtly surreal painting, Sean Mellyn's A Girl Named Brancusi. Opposite, an especially whimsical Marc Newson chair is paired with a glaring yellow side table by Konstantin Grcic. These pieces seem to exaggerate the disorienting possibilities of the view by introducing a willful confusion of scales. So it falls to the low table in the center of the living space to function as the anchor proper. From afar, it looks like just that: a heavy block, composed of river stones in concrete. But wait\u2014when you approach and touch it, it gives. The piece, designed by Andrea Salvetti, is made of foam. \"What is heavy is really soft; what is textured is really light,\" Gorlin says. \"The visual sensations are mixed.\"\n\nLike any architect designing for himself, Gorlin also took the opportunity to use some favorite pieces he's had his eye on for years. The dining table, off to one side of the living area, is a glass-and-steel composition by Carlo Scarpa that Gorlin admires for its detailing. \"It's so intricately put together,\" he says. \"I picked things that I've always loved.\" But power and surrealism and views and glaring sun aside, there remains one question to ask the architect who designed an apartment for himself in a building he designed that also bears his name: Was it hard? \"No,\" Gorlin answers, still amused by his happy predicament. \"Not when you approach it with a sense of fun.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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