Architects hired for classroom building and dining hall/student center

DPZ was founded in 1980 by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk to replace suburban sprawl with neighborhood-based planning. At the time, Duany and Plater-Zyberk were founding partners of the still vital firm, Arquitectonica, renowned for its playful condominium towers on the Miami coast (yes, that condo with the big hole in the middle that appeared in Miami Vice was a design of that firm). However, a serious concern began to grow within both young architects, who struggled with how the individual buildings they designed did not relate in any meaningful way to the cities surrounding them. This concern soon evolved into the team finding ways to design environments in which the placement of individual buildings made sense in an urban context and held less importance than the spaces between them.