Michael Halflants

Michael Halflants, FAIA is a full professor at the University of South Florida and the firm’s design principal. A native of Brussels, he studied architecture at the St. Lucas Institute before earning a Master of Architecture from the University of Florida, where he received the Henry Adams Gold Medal, the program’s highest design honor.

He began his career as a project designer with the Polshek Partnership in New York, contributing to theaters, offices, and the Spencer Museum in Kansas. He led the adaptive reuse of the 1854 Astor Library,New York City’s first public library, into the Joseph Papp Public Theater, and collaborated with Arata Isozaki’s Tokyo office on a bold contemporary addition to the McKim, Mead & White Brooklyn Museum.

In 2006, Halflants co-founded Halflants + Pichette Architects. The firm has since received sixty-seven American Institute of Architects awards, including the National AIA Young Architect Award and the Tampa Bay AIA Firm of the Year. Since 2014, it has garnered five national medals from the Association of Licensed Architects, and in 2018, the Illinois Institute of Technology nominated the Anna Maria House for the Mies Crown Hall Prize of the Americas.

The firm’s work has been featured in Dwell, AIArchitect, Residential Architect, and nine issues of Florida Caribbean Architect, with four cover features. In recognition of his lifetime achievements, Halflants was awarded the 2018 AIA Florida Medal of Honor for Design, the state’s highest design award, and was elevated to the AIA National College of Fellows in 2021.

Halflants has presented the firm’s work at the Universidad La Gran Colombia in Bogotá and at AIA conventions in Florida, Colorado, Puerto Rico, and Wisconsin, and has lectured internationally on tropical design and housing in Singapore, Jakarta, and Bangkok. In Sarasota, he served as Chair of the City Planning Board and, for the past fifteen years, has organized 10×10, a public design forum.

At USF, he teaches graduate studios and seminars on tropical architecture and modern housing, fostering connections between academia, professional practice, and the community. He initiated the school’s biannual open house and has led study-abroad programs to Mexico City, the Yucatán, Brazil, Japan, Berlin, Peru, Oslo, Copenhagen, the Netherlands, and Spain. In 2010, he received the Florida/Caribbean AIA McMinn Award for his contributions to architectural education.