Press

Arts & Architecture

ARTISTRY + SCIENCE = GLORIOUS LIVING SPACES

Steve Talty, Herald Staff Writer

The sign on the yellow door reads "The Hoffman Gallery: Arts and Architecture." Inside, William Hoffman is at work on both.

Hoffman is a Fort Lauderdale architect who divides his time, his mind and his studio between traditional architecture and the applied arts of industrial, interior and graphic design.

Inside his white-walls-and-wood floor loft studio on Sunrise Boulevard at the Intracoastal Waterway, Hoffman is putting together an applied arts museum featuring his work and the work of nationally known artist such as John Brooks.

“I’m doing a wide variety of things,” said Hoffman. The range goes from designing new homes, to rehabilitating and updating existing ones, to designing yacht interiors, furniture, “the Hoffman bed,” and a current project: designing and entirely hand-built house for the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina.

Hoffman grew up studying “math, science, and design,” and found his interest captured by both architecture and oceanography at the University of Florida. After graduating and working for architects in Miami and Boston, the building industry stopped dead.

During this down period, he taught design at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale for two years, and then headed to the University of Colorado for his master’s in architecture, doing his thesis in Passive Cooling in South Florida Houses. After getting his degree in 1979, he returned to work with South Florida design firms and then opened Hoffman Arts and Architecture in 1986.

From the architectural side of Hoffman’s studio have come dozens of South Florida homes. His architectural recipe mixes two Frank-Lloyd Wright and Californian Geary, Japanese thought, the Bauhaus school and the down-to-earth ideas of Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language”. Somehow, the results taste of South Florida.

“For me, to live South Florida is to be part of the environment,” he said. “I like to open the houses up, extend the sight lines to the property edge instead of the house walls. Opening the interior spaces to Florida’s lush tropical vegetation.”

“I’m deriving my own aesthetic,” he said. “People are brought up to desire what they are used to and I try to give them something else, something more than that.”

His houses use natural materials; natural ventilation; a clean, sometimes raw, interior look; and hidden lighting.

The Russell house in Coral-Gables-by-the-Sea, which he designed inside and out and which was featured on Miami Vice, is a showcase for his ideas.

He used angular coral base on the outside planter, which flows into the home and forms the living room wall. In Hoffman’s use of materials and flow-through design, the house is constantly breaking through the inside/outside barrier.

The house’s design also ‘breaks down”, in proportion and visually, as you walk in. “I’ve also was fortunate that I’ve received an excellent education in basic design, and I first approach a house with that in mind,” Hoffman said, “heat loss, heat gain, north-south alignment, those kinds of very practical elements.”

Hoffman said his intense training has led him to a greater appreciation of design and craftsmanship. “What we’re trying to do is put together a nationally acclaimed applied arts gallery. That could get things started.”

Right now, the studio contains a Shaker ladder-back chair by John Brooks on loan from the American Crafts Museum in New York, a prototype for the “the Hoffman bed,” examples of clean, industrial design in the shape of three teapots, and examples of hand-made ceramics.

I really like pure form, “Hoffman said. “It brings a kind of peace to my soul. “Hoffman has designed a new-aged bed, using a triangular steel frame design topped by a rectangular wood base, which he hopes to market. Details remain shrouded because of industry competition.

In addition, much of this enthusiasm now centers on the Penland House, a small exhibit home he is designing for the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. Hoffman designed the timber frame post and beam house and is directing artisans who are creating everything from the tables to the flatware. “It’s a once-in-lifetime gig,” he said.

His view of South Florida architecture, on the other hand, is not a glowing one. But he says there is some hope. "Arquitectonica is the best thing ever to happen to Florida architecture," he said. "It's really sculpture designed to be seen at 60 miles an hour, and the detail breaks down when you get close, but it's still a big step forward."

Hoffman says he would love to design “a few homes a year,” which would leave him free to pursue all his interests, but is happy with his current agenda.

"If I had all the money in the world, I would be doing what I'm doing now," he said.