PHILOSOPHY
TROPICA is Design-Build team of architects, gardeners, and interior designers, equally focused on architecture, landscape design, and interior design. TROPICA’s creative team transforms with each project, growing to include other experts in the natural fields: arborists, botanists, stone masons, nursery owners, and so on… Founder Josh Ehrlich holds a degree in architecture and landscape architecture, and trained in Switzerland with Herzog & de Meuron for five years. Founding Partner Mari Tzakis is both an architect and interior designer, allowing us to work on every space of the site at once.
It is critical to us that we design sites, not buildings – we want to create places, not just structures. In fact, we prefer to consider our work to be ‘gardens for living‘. We treat interior and exterior spaces as equally important and believe this attitude opens up new types of architectural expressions, in which the garden or landscape can have a strong impact of the experience, character, and appearance of the building.
With each project, we not only honor the site’s ecology, climate, and environment but also endeavor to create new and diverse habitats for plants, birds, pollinators butterflies, and most importantly, humans. The main ingredients of our architecture are gravity, plants, soil, rock, and wind.
We are interested in sustainable building practices, through the reuse and repurposing of materials and elements found directly within the site. We are a Boots-On-The-Ground, Hands-In-The-Dirt team. The site is the primary material element of our work.
We arrange Architecture and Gardens by moving and reconfiguring elements within the site: re-claiming, re-using, and re-interpreting.
Considering the robust structural requirements within a hurricane zone, we value all existing elements of the siteto engage with these codes. The work is informed by: massive stone boulders quarried for structure and facades, carving spaces into limestone bedrock, or milling invasive trees for repurposing. Other projects re-claim discarded dock pilings as wood screens, salvage native trees slated for removal, and re-use structural lumber.
We’ve also re-purposed existing structures that were deemed unusable by FEMA. Rather than razing existing plots, we alter our drawing delivery, submitting permit sets in 10+ phases to rejuvenate vernacular homes with “grand-fathered” relationships to water, otherwise disallowed today.