One recent Friday evening, Bernardo Fort-Brescia, the driving force behind the rapidly expanding Miami firm Arquitectonica, was still in his Brickell office, grappling with a last-minute glitch: Drawings for a massive commercial project had to be redrawn quickly.

They were due Monday.

Halfway around the globe in Dubai.

And that likely meant, because of time differences, an all-nighter for the energetic 55-year-old architect and some of his associates.

With all the cranes hovering over downtown Miami condo projects, South Floridians might be forgiven for thinking that's all local architects ever do. But, in fact, the business of architecture, long the domain of local firms focused on parochial work, has become globalized.

In Miami, architecture is suddenly a hot commodity. As the city goes about remaking its skyline, it has become both an exporter and importer of stylish architecture.

Even as a small invasion of international starchitects such as Cesar Pelli, Frank Gehry and the Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron grab marquee projects -- performing arts centers and new museums -- a growing number of local architects have seized on the city's new global cachet as a red-hot center of contemporary design to win big jobs abroad.

Not only are their projects going up in the Caribbean and Latin America, as one might expect, but also in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

The allure, they say, is not the local Mediterranean cliché but the sleek, modern design of this area's newest high-rise condos, office towers and luxe hotels. It doesn't hurt that, just as Miami Vice in the 1980s gave global exposure to Miami Beach's pastel Art Deco rehabs, CSI:Miami, popular the world over, now spotlights the city's glittering new skyline in seductive helicopter shots.

''Miami has become a brand. It has a buzz,'' said Julio Grabiel, managing partner at Coral Gables-based Spillis Candela DMJM, whose portfolio of projects reaches from Florida to Dubai, Cairo, Oman and Kuwait. ``People have a strong image of Miami as cutting-edge. It's almost like you're prequalified if you're from Miami.''

Local architects -- from those at established firms such as Arquitectonica and Spillis Candela to up-and-comers such as Chad Oppenheim, Kobi Karp and Reinaldo Borges -- are capitalizing on a global appetite for snazzy Miami design.

The city's high-rise condo boom has provided broad exposure and opportunity for young architects to tackle big projects. Otherwise, they might have had to wait years for a chance at a 50-story downtown tower like 10 Museum Park, which was designed by 37-year-old Oppenheim's firm.

Now that the housing market has cooled, local firms also have gone prospecting for work beyond the Sunshine State.

Oppenheim's 35-person Miami firm, founded just nine years ago as a one-man shop, has residential and hotel projects under way from the Turks and Caicos to Switzerland and Dubai. Though many of the local towers his firm designed are on hold, Oppenheim said he's hiring.

'People saw what we did here and contacted us to do projects outside of Miami. [They] said, `Oh, that would be great in Las Vegas.' So now we're doing projects in Vegas,'' said Oppenheim, an Arquitectonica alum.

``In Miami our architecture, especially the residential, is about lifestyle. Miami has a sort of knack for understanding lifestyle. It's been that way since the founding of the city. It's always been about this kind of allure; it's Eden. It's always been about pleasure and fulfilling desire.''

Miami architect Reinaldo Borges also started small with just three people eight years ago, but his firm has grown to 25 and has projects that reach from Mexico and the Caribbean to Dubai to Odessa in the Ukraine, where a developer asked him to ''bring the Miami modern style'' to a waterfront project.

''We're not limited anymore to being regional practitioners,'' said Borges, who specializes in residential design from town houses to 70-story towers.

''Now we get to explore all over, and it's because of the kind of exposure we have in Miami,'' he said. His local projects include Infinity in the Brickell district.

A handful of local firms known for innovation with a traditionalist tinge also have attained national and global stature.

NEW URBANISM

Focused more on planning than architecture, firms such as Duany Plater-Zyberk and Co. and Dover, Kohl & Partners are leading proponents of New Urbanism, a movement which espouses traditional, compact, pedestrian-friendly towns and neighborhoods for new development and urban retrofits.

Since first gaining fame for creating the Florida Panhandle town of Seaside in the 1980s, DPZ has designed new towns and developments across the United States and now has projects underway in Scotland, Belgium, England, Spain and Bulgaria, among other places.

But no one has taken the Miami style as far as Arquitectonica. When Oppenheim left the firm to go out on his own, there were fewer than 20 people in Arquitectonica's Miami office, he said.

Now Arquitectonica has become a veritable colossus, with 600 employees and offices and big projects in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Shanghai, to name just a few of its global outposts. From a modest start in a Coconut Grove strip mall 30 years ago, Fort-Brescia and Laurinda Spear, his wife and design partner, have nurtured Arquitectonica into this area's largest homegrown architecture and design firm and one of the fastest-growing in the country.

SELLING AN IDEA

''What is amazing about Arquitectonica is that Bernardo just went out and sold design,'' said Jose Gelabert-Navia, architecture professor at the University of Miami and managing director of the Miami office of Perkins + Will, a Chicago-based giant. ``I really admire what they've done.''

At the same time their global profile has risen, Miami architects face increased competition for work at home. Now a new class of national architectural conglomerates -- huge firms with alphabet names like HKS, HOK and RTKL -- are competing for, and winning, jobs in South Florida out of local offices, which better satisfy clients' increasing demand for close access to their architects.

Perkins + Will, for instance, which opened here in 1996, is designing major buildings for the University of Miami's medical school at the Jackson Memorial campus.

HEALTHCARE FOCUS

Since working on Jackson Memorial's Ryder Trauma Center, HKS, a Texas firm specializing in healthcare facilities and hotels, has done work across South Florida, including additions and improvements for Baptist and Miami Children's hospitals and a new hospital and academic center at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. HKS is also responsible for the top-to-bottom rehab underway at the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach.

All that work and a good prospect of more prompted HKS to send partner Francisco Gonzalez from Dallas late last year to open a 12-person office at 1221 Brickell Ave., a tower the firm had designed in the 1980s.

''In the last five years, clients have put a lot more emphasis on local services,'' Gonzalez said. ``We'd been handling it well before, flying back and forth, but that put a little bit of wear on our staff.''

For architects whose strategy is to stay local, the influx of star architects and corporate players have meant not just more competition but also more opportunity.

The Coral Gables firm of Rodriguez and Quiroga, for instance, will work with renown Briton Sir Nicholas Grimshaw's firm as associate architects on the new science museum in downtown Miami.

INCREASING DIVERSITY

''Architecture in Miami has become more diverse, like the city itself,'' said co-principal Raul Rodriguez, whose 25-year-old firm focuses on civic, school and university work. ``No one has a lock on the business. Everyone has to earn their wings every day. It's very competitive, much more than it ever was.''

At Spillis Candela, the decision to broaden the firm's work -- which includes civic, educational and commercial buildings -- and geographic reach was a way to ride out the boom-and-bust cycles that characterize the profession. Many firms also have branched out into landscape design, planning, construction management and, in some cases, engineering.

BRANCHING OUT

''To keep growing and keep the firm strong, we can't depend on the local market,'' said Grabiel, whose firm also has designed courthouses and municipal buildings from Sunny Isles and Cape Coral to Michigan and Calgary, Canada. ``It's not big enough.''

But prospects are not equally rosy for all.

The coming year could be a painful one for local firms that expanded with South Florida's astounding but now troubled high-rise condo boom. Some are sure to contract as construction jobs wind down, with few immediate prospects for new work.

''I have to believe that if things continue like this, everyone will have to start scaling down,'' said Luis Revuelta, who was named Architect of the Year by the Miami chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2007. ``It's going to affect all of us.''