Paul Fischman was born at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami in 1978, the same hospital where his father was completing his residency. That detail matters to him, because it is one of many threads connecting his family to the city he has spent his career reshaping.
“With the birth of my daughter a few years ago, we now have five generations of deep family roots in Miami,” Fischman said, “with a triple legacy at the University of Miami.”
The family eventually settled in Vero Beach, where Fischman grew up along the Intracoastal Waterway. The architecture there, he said, mostly left him underwhelmed: subdivisions with what he calls “builder versions” of the British West Indies style. But what he found uninspiring as a kid also made him curious, and that curiosity became a career.
Today, Fischman is a principal and managing partner at Choeff Levy Fischman Architecture + Design, the Miami-based firm he runs with founder Ralph Choeff and partner Raphael Levy. The firm has become one of South Florida’s most recognized names in high-end residential design, known for a signature tropical modern aesthetic that defines much of Miami Beach’s most exclusive enclaves, such as Venetian Islands, Star Island, and North Bay Road, to name a few.
Before all of that came Key West. With family roots on the island stretching back generations, Fischman spent four to six weeks there each year as a child, visiting his grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ houses. It was there, even before he had the vocabulary for it, that he began understanding what he now calls the principles of tropical design.
“Jalousie windows. Cross ventilation. Deep overhangs. Limiting glazing on certain sides of the house,” he said. “These are old environmental design principles for the tropics and subtropics. I didn’t understand back then that these were environmental design techniques, it’s how people lived in South Florida in the early 1900s with no air conditioning and a lot of humidity.”
That foundation preceded his formal education. He left Florida for the University of Colorado, where he earned an undergraduate degree in environmental design, then returned south to complete a Master of Architecture at the University of Miami School of Architecture in 2005.
Fischman credits the University with teaching him how to transform design concepts into something buildable. The U is also where he found his own design philosophy in architecture.
“I learned how to design in Colorado, whereas UM taught me how to encapsulate that into every one of my designs,” he said. “UM is where I said: I know who I am as a developing architect.”
He was not a typical Miami architecture student. At a school he describes as more rooted in planning and historical architecture at the time, Fischman stood out as the modernist in the room. Professors including Dennis Hector, Jean-François Lejeune, and Leon Krier pushed him to lean into it rather than conform.
“I was the purple elephant,” he said. “My drawings looked different. I made colorful renderings, while others documented existing buildings. Professors like Leon Krier told me to embrace modernism, embrace being different.”
He also started working before he graduated. In his second year of graduate school, he began doing 3D renderings and design presentations for Choeff, using the University studio computers after hours to juggle thesis work and real client deadlines simultaneously.
“It taught me the business of architecture,” Fischman said. “Clients don’t say, ‘It’s okay if you don’t hit your deadline.’ You don’t sleep until you hit your deadline.”
That working relationship stretched more than a decade before Fischman formally joined as a partner in 2012. In the intervening years, he worked at larger firms such as Arquitectonica under Bernardo Fort-Brescia, an experience he credits with teaching him construction knowledge, structural thinking, and the global appeal of climate-responsive design. When international clients seek out CLF today, Fischman says part of the draw is Miami-Dade County’s status as a Zone 1 hurricane zone, the most demanding building standard in the country.
Fischman and the firm regularly hire University graduates and interns from the School of Architecture, and he recently toured the school’s expanded Thomas P. Murphy Design Studio Building with Dean Rodolphe el-Khoury—a visit that, by his account, left him nearly speechless.
“My jaw dropped to the ground,” he said. “It’s a completely different place now.”
He hopes to guest jury in design studios and eventually teach. His advice to current students is less about technique and more about resolve.
“Don’t let people tell you that you can’t do something,” he said. “Everything they told me we couldn’t design in Florida 20 years ago, we’re doing things 10 times more sophisticated today.”
