The Rick Owens Flagship Oratory holds the corner of the northern plaza terminating the a new pedestrian path cutting through the Miami Design District. Its entrance is located within a semi-enclosed courtyard that provides a transitional space from the main plaza to the inner world of the Oratory. Engaging the plaza’s latent diagonal through the courtyard allows the Oratory to both define a boundary for the district while also providing a continuation of the promenade, drawing pedestrians up into its space.

Moreover, the figuration of the central courtyard calls to attention certain formal ambiguities possessed by the Oratory, which appears to straddle typologies. Is the Oratory a centrally planned space with a corner bitten off? Or is its diagram perhaps a U-shaped plan in the process of closing-up? Or perhaps an axial space split and wrapped around a courtyard? Underscoring the indeterminacy of its form is a material interplay between fluid and stereotomic elements. Like the work of Rick Owens, the Oratory engages simultaneously the ancient and the contemporary. Brick walls and ferro-concrete vaults push and pull on one another, creating a spatial environment that is at once malleable and hard, stony and supple.