BUSINESS PROFILE
Rick McCormack is taking up space
BY EVAN WILLIAMS ewilliams@florida-weekly.com
When architect Rick McCormack, CEO of R.J. McCormack, looks at the empty field outside his office, he understands it in a way most people probably don't. He knows the answer, for example, to this question: Could you build a 184-room condominium on it?

FLORIDA WEEKLY PHOTO BY EVAN WILLIAMS Rick McCormack

"Oh absolutely," he said, quickly surveying the field. "There's no doubt."

His firm did just that, in fact, in North Fort Myers with the North Star Yacht Club, a $100 million condo development, recently finished. Its key feature is that all the units face south, so they're in the sun all winter.

McCormack was trained in classical and urban architecture at the University of Notre Dame; but practicing architecture in the real world marketplace, he said, as opposed to the idealistic confines of college, led to different kinds of experience and influence.

"After starting my own practice and getting into the realities of design - homes and large projects - Addison Mizner really influenced me," McCormack said. "[Mizner] practiced in Palm Beach. You know all those mansions in Palm Beach? That's Italian, Spanish, and Moorish architecture…then, as a board member of INTBAU (International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism), I have become great friends with Robert Adam, who wrote the book 'Classical Architecture.' He is a tremendous architect and a very creative thinker."

McCormack spent his senior year in Rome, where he saw four of the masterworks of Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio: the Villa Rotunda ("When you're inside of it looking out, it really focuses the views to the outside"), the Villa Malcontenta, the Villa Barbaro (which has a sundial on the face), and the Villa Godi.

"They're in my DNA," McCormack said.

So is Cuban blood. You might not be able to see it unless he tells you, but then there it is.

"We did catch a lot of flack for being Hispanic in high school," he remembered, being one of the only five Hispanics in his class in Miami; but other experiences were measurably more pleasant.

"I'd taken a geometry course from Brother Patrick," he said. "And geometry was so clear to me, for some reason. And the following year, I took mechanical drawing, and it was the fastest hour of my life. I just decided…and I've been living my dream ever since."

He had moved with his parents to Miami in the sixth grade, during the summer of 1960, and before that attended La Fayette, a bilingual grade school, in Havana.

"My parents spoke Spanish in the house, but I was learning American grammar during the day," said McCormack, who was born in 1949. "When Castro came, we immediately moved out, the first summer he was there."

McCormack went on to build relationships with many Florida developers in the 30 years since he started his own firm, which has a staff of 15.

"An architect in a one-man firm has to do it all himself," he said. "An architect in a 100-man firm only gets to do a small portion of the work on a design."

R.J. McCormack does work on large projects, but only completes a few a year. For example, Plantation on Marco Island, Beach House and Seapoint in Naples, and many others.

For a current project, now in the planning process, McCormack is designing a revitalization of the Times Square area on Fort Myers Beach. Construction is planned to begin late in 2008, he said, and will change the look of the main entry point from Matanzas Pass Bridge. Plans include a four-star hotel and spa, upscale retail and office space components, a parking complex, and a 250-foot public beachfront park. The hardest part of this design, he said, was figuring out where the space for a restaurant would go.

"My personal opinion was that the restaurant should be right on the entrance to the park, so all the initial preliminary design showed it there," he said. "We fought and fought and fought to have it be there…

"Then we realized it should have a very prominent location and a very spectacular view. But it should be away from the entrance, in a place that has services next to it, on Canal Street…

"It was a little bit of grinding, and a little bit of standing on the site, and…really, not luck. You have to be patient with it sometimes.

"We're really just solving space needs. That's what architects do."

But they also do other things, the proof of which are the framed photographs McCormack hangs in the hallways of his office, some of which are part of his series of people on benches he took while vacationing with his wife in Paris and Florence.

"I love photography. I've done a lot of still lifes of flowers, buildings, people, portraits…I like capturing the essence of a situation that isn't posed, and that's fun, because it's life itself. You get to watch it, and as it's happening, you get to capture it, and see it in a photograph. It's a split second in time, and what I'm doing as an artist is composing it in my viewfinder."

McCormack said he doesn't know if the interest in photography is in any way connected to being an architect. It's just something he enjoys doing.

Some of his photographs are featured at The Gallery at the Norris Center, at 755 Eighth Ave. So. in downtown Naples until Nov. 30. In an exhibit called "Art by Architects." Stop in or call 239-263-8242 for more information. ¦