Supporting the star

From the South Florida Market Report: Sometimes it starts with mere squiggles on a piece of paper, a design architect’s embryonic glimpse of a prospective building.

But it’s another architect — the nuts-and-bolts guy, the purveyor of plans, technical drawings and piles of construction documents — who brings that original idea to life before the first brick can be laid.

The exuberant construction boom sweeping Miami and the surrounding landscape, much of it stratospherically expensive condos and high-end hotels, has meant a growing number of collaborations between big-name architects from elsewhere — the so-called starchitects — and local architects who are deeply tuned in to how things are done around here. [more]