Architecture for the Tropics

Eric Macgregor Urbahn was born in 1948, first son of Maximillian Otto Urbahn, celebrated architect and widely acknowledged Renaissance Man. Eric was exposed to architecture from an early age and travelled often with his father on inspection tours of various projects. Among these were the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Batavia Illinois and NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building and Launch Control Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Eric studied architecture at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and quickly grew to love both the southwestern hacienda style of residential design as well as the work of Wright and Solari which was the subject of lively conversation in the design studios at U. of A. Architecture school. Having grown up in Connecticut and southern New York State, he was also comfortably familiar with the building styles of the Northeastern United States. His family’s summer cottage in Nantucket provided a few weeks each year of beautiful, familiar counterpoint to the exciting vastness of the west.,

After post-graduate seminars in Scottsdale and Tempe, Eric Urbahn returned east. He spent some years as an instructor in basic structural design with the Navy’s ESI program and in 1975, began a 4-year assignment to Lagos, Nigeria, headquarters of Max Urbahn’s International office. Travelling to satellite offices in Cairo, Tehran and Riyadh, Eric had become Max Urbahn’s overseas manager by 1978, when he returned to the USA.

Eric opened his first design office in 1979 in Camden, Maine. He spent several years there before moving back to Connecticut and a partnership with his father. They formed Urbahn Architects, with offices in Stonington and New London. These years were among Eric Urbahn’s favorites in his long career. Urbahn Architects was a small firm with a staff of 10, but the work completed included University buildings and master plans. They completed Elderly housing projects and libraries as well as numerous jobs for the Navy and Coast Guard in Groton and New London. Occasionally, a residential job would come to the office and it was these which Eric Urbahn most enjoyed. The firm received many state and national awards for excellence in design.

A lifelong sailor, Eric completed a long-anticipated circumnavigation of the world aboard his sloop Finback, departing Nantucket in October of 1990. From Nantucket, Finback’s track pointed south and west through the Bahamas to Panama, thence west-southwest via the Marquesas, Tahiti, Tonga and Fiji to New Zealand. She carried on to Australia and Indonesia, crossing the South Indian Ocean to Mauritius and South Africa, arriving in Durban just after Christmas of 1992. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope, she turned her bows north again, arriving in Nantucket in June of 1993.  In 2 years and 8 months, Finback had covered 36,000 miles. Eric was awarded the New York Yacht Club Cruising Award, 1994, and in 2010, he was honored with the Waring Partridge Circumnavigation Award.

Living and working on the Dominican Republic’s north coast since 1996, U.S. registered architect Eric Urbahn has more than 40 tropical villa designs to his credit.  Through years of exhaustive research, he has evolved a system for design tailored specifically for this corner of the world.  It is a system that combines grace, strength and ease of maintenance. He believe's strongly in the concept of home as the ultimate refuge. Home, he says, should serve one in all ways - in physical comfort, in intellectual satisfaction and in spiritual release.