Merrill Pastor and Colgan Architects is a small firm that has, since 1990, performed at the highest level of design. We work at a wide variety of scales, with a broad range of building programs, and on varied sites. Scott Merrill, who founded the firm, has for the last twenty years been the lead designer for the firm. Partners George Pastor and David Colgan have been involved with project management and design assistance in all of the firm’s major projects in the last fifteen years.

Recognition

Scott Merrill’s first project as a sole practitioner received a national AIA Design Award in 1990. Our first group of buildings as a small firm received a national AIA Urban Design Award in 2000. Our first public building received a national AIA Design Award in 2004. We started working at a larger scale when we won a federal courthouse in the GSA’s Design Excellence program in 2001.

Our work, as a whole, received the Arthur Ross Award from the Institute of Classical Architecture in New York in 2004. We were cited by the jury’s chair, Jaque Robertson, for the inventiveness of our traditional work. We have been recognized fourteen times by the Florida Association of the AIA for the design of a number of different building types.

Scott Merrill has lectured on the firm’s work at Yale, Notre Dame, Berkeley, and the Houston Fine Arts Museum; in New York at the Lotos Club and the University Club; and at AIA chapters throughout Florida and the south. Our work has been written about by the architectural historian Vincent Scully. We have collaborated with some of the world’s best architects and land planners.

Overview of Projects

We work at all scales, from houses to master plans. We intentionally do not specialize in a particular type of work. Projects address all scales of work from a 3,000 square foot chapel to a master plan for twenty million square feet.

We have done a federal courthouse, churches, town halls, a university addition and master plan, an office campus, hotels, mixed use town centers, clubs, a parking garage, multifamily and single family housing, barns, and the architecture for a master plan proposal for an entire new central business district.

We have done projects all over the world- in New Zealand, St. Petersburg, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, and throughout the Caribbean. We work on undistinguished flat coastal plains where beautiful landscapes have to be formed; on Audubon easements and historic estates where beautiful landscapes have to be maintained; in historic districts, in central business districts, on college campuses, on ocean fronts, marinas, small islands, and on mountainsides with slopes of thirty percent. We routinely design for hurricane wind loads.

For twenty years our principle interest has been the development of land use models that use land more efficiently. To this point the energy benefits of good site planning have been on the margins of the sustainability issue because they are difficult to quantify. This is changing. The sustainability implications of the effort to use land effectively will become more explicitly acknowledged by the development community when LEED’s pilot program, LEED ND comes on line. LEED ND emphasizes the energy savings of good site planning. We have an ongoing interest in making relatively dense projects appealing, beautiful and fun to live in.

Urban Design, Historic Preservation, Sustainability and Project Management

We have an ongoing focus on merging architecture and urban design and as we work increasingly at larger scales, the distinction between site planning and urban design blurs. In designing multi- building projects there is a consistent emphasis on designing the perimeter to make city good blocks, on designing the edge to create attractive points at which to enter the block, on designing the block interiors to add value to less valuable land, and on designing buildings and spaces that make movement through the site interesting and enjoyable and integrated with larger existing patterns of circulation.

Scott Merrill did drawings for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and did numerous small additions while interning in Washington, DC. As a firm, we have done houses and small additions in historic districts like Telluride, Edgartown and Highland Park. We did a house at the Shelburne Farm Estate in Vermont where the principal preservation issue had more to do with maintaining the integrity of the historic landscape.

We are doing some master planning for the University of Miami’s School of Architecture. In something of an inversion of the typical preservation scenario, the existing campus is comprised of a new classical building and proto modern historic structures from the late 1940’s. There is vigorous debate about the preservation of these unquestionably significant historic buildings because they are in such bad shape and promise to be expensive to save.

We have experience with complex client groups. The Fort Pierce Federal Courthouse had at least a hundred parties with a vital interest in the project- from federal judges, clerks and court architects, to US Marshalls, federal attorneys and defenders, to GSA peer reviewers, GSA project managers and the GSA’s MEP and security consultants. We dealt with GSA offices in both Washington and Atlanta, and a courts system out of Miami. Both the GSA project manager and the Federal judge are among our references.

We are especially proud that the selection committee’s faith in us was ultimately justified by the outcome. Our project, even with its nice finishes, its public garden, and grand public space, sat ready and on budget when money became available last year. The GSA has an exemplary process of competing and independent estimates at the end of design development and at 95% of construction documents. These independent estimates are then reconciled by the project managers. Upon finally bidding the job, three of seven bidders came in under budget.

Summary

 We have consistently addressed all these concerns for the last twenty years and we will carry them into future projects.