Jorge Arango

Jorge Arango (29 November 1917 – 21 October 2007) was a Colombian-born US architect.

Arango was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and educated in Chile, Colombia and at Harvard.^[1] Arango was invited to come to America by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the U.S. State Department.

He was co-founder of the Arango design store in the Dadeland Mall in South Miami in 1959 with his then-wife, Judith. The store, which still exists, was an early beacon of good design, a pre-Luminaire. At Arango, designers could equip the 1960s Bauhaus-inspired homes in Coconut Grove with Iittala glassware and Alvar Aalto chairs.

An advocate of a minimalist architecture and maximum human value in design, Arango was a designer, educator, and writer. He taught architecture at the University of California Berkeley in the 1950s, For years he wrote passionate columns against developments in Miami like Bayside,^[2] and condo towers that blocked the streets off from the water.^[3] He designed several modest-size homes in Miami that displayed his design credo: an open flow of rooms, natural breezes, large windows, no baseboards, small tiles in the bathroom, large tiles in the rest of the home.

He was a professor of Architecture at the District University of Bogotá, a columnist for the Miami Herald, and a correspondent for magazines like Metropolitan Home and Elle Décor. Over the years he wrote many books including "The Urbanization of the Earth" (1970), "Villa Sofia" (2003), and "Ecophilia: The Future Is Waiting" (2000).^[4]

Arango died at home in Miami in hospice care. He was survived by his third wife, Penelope, two sons and two daughters, and the design store.