Equipped with the utmost in technology and environmental sustainability, 600 Brickell at Brickell World Plaza is the latest entrant to Miami’s financial district, soaring to 40 stories of glass and steel.

The lobby is lined in eucalyptus wood, the floors decked in marble. And set back from the street, it is skirted by a grand plaza, designed to be to Miami what Rockefeller Plaza is to New York.

Yet, beyond the modern office building’s exterior, its conceptual roots are firmly planted in Midwestern fields of corn, and Southern plantations of timberland.

600 Brickell at Brickell World Plaza, just completed, lies at that crossroads of the past and future — years in the making and designed to next-generation standards, but now mostly unoccupied, its destiny is still unknown.

The building was developed by native Miamian Loretta Cockrum, who grew up spending her summers at her family’s farms in Indiana and Illinois. It was there that she formed a love of the land.

Nearly 40 years ago, after working for the nation’s largest ranch management company, she started her own business, Foram Group, helping families run their farms.

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Now, she views Brickell Avenue’s newest commercial real estate tower — the only one in Florida LEED pre-certified platinum, the highest green rating — as the natural progression of that stewardship of land.

“It is the foundation of our sustainable commitment, because if you are managing farmland and timberland and you are not an incredible steward of that property, there is nothing that will deteriorate faster,” said Cockrum, whose company still manages 25,000 acres in South Carolina, Georgia and Colorado, for its clients. “So it applies to the building of a vertical building.

“Therefore, we didn’t wake up one morning and say this sounds like a cool idea, let’s build a LEED building.  . . .  This building is a culmination of all those years,” she added. “It just happened to get wrapped up in a vertical construction project.’’

Built at a cost of $310 million, including $180 million of equity, 600 Brickell at Brickell World Plaza is owned by a family originally from Malaysia, which has entrusted the preservation of its ample wealth to Foram Group, as its fiduciaries.

In fact, Cockrum created the tower as part of a 100-year strategic plan for the family, geared to be relevant 25 years from now, Cockrum said.

“You have to be building for a future,” she said. “I told them we are not going to be profitable in the beginning, and may not see a profit for 10 years,” she said. “They said do whatever you have to do.”

Cockum, who has represented the family for 35 years, first purchased the Brickell property in 1990. Over the next six years she assembled all the various parcels (in addition to the 85,000 square-foot building), including three outparcels between Brickell Avenue and the Metromover.

“My original plan,” she said, “was to hold it for 10 years and then build a significant building, a flagship for this family portfolio.”

Brickell was coming alive as a vibrant location, not just to work, but as a place to live and a destination to dine out.

“It was that energy and that ignition of life that would allow us to build something like this,” Cockrum said. “Otherwise, it’s just another stagnant office building.”