Florida is not the first place most people think of when they think about American architectural history. The state's reputation is for sprawl, strip malls, and the kind of generic development that has consumed most of its coastline. That reputation is not entirely undeserved. But it obscures a genuine and significant architectural tradition that flourished in the state from the late 1940s through the early 1960s.
The Sarasota School
The Sarasota School of Architecture was not a formal institution. It was a group of architects — Paul Rudolph, Ralph Twitchell, Victor Lundy, Tim Seibert, Mark Hampton, and others — who were working in and around Sarasota in the postwar years and who shared a commitment to modernism and a shared problem: how to build for Florida's climate.
Florida's climate is brutal. The heat is intense from April through October. The humidity is constant. The afternoon thunderstorms are violent and frequent. Air conditioning was not widely available in the late 1940s, and even when it became available, the Sarasota School architects were skeptical of it. They believed that a building should work with its climate, not against it.
They believed that a building should work with its climate, not against it. This was a design problem, not a technology problem.
The solutions they developed were elegant: deep overhangs to shade the walls and windows, louvered screens to allow air movement while blocking direct sun, cross-ventilation to draw air through the building, and the careful orientation of buildings to take advantage of prevailing breezes. These are not complicated ideas, but they require a level of attention to site and climate that most contemporary architecture ignores.
Paul Rudolph
Paul Rudolph is the most significant architect to emerge from the Sarasota School. He was born in Kentucky in 1918, studied at Harvard under Walter Gropius, and came to Sarasota in 1941 to work with Ralph Twitchell. He stayed for a decade, designing some of the most inventive small buildings in American architectural history.
The Healy Guest House (1948), the Cocoon House (1950), the Umbrella House (1953) — these buildings are experiments in the relationship between structure, climate, and space. They use steel, wood, and concrete in ways that were unusual for their time, and they use them in service of a clear idea: that architecture should respond to where it is.
Rudolph left Florida in 1958 to chair the architecture department at Yale. His later work — the Yale Art and Architecture Building, the Government Service Center in Boston — is more monumental, more complex, and more controversial. But the Florida buildings show what he was before Yale: a careful, inventive architect who was genuinely interested in the problem of building in a specific place.
Ralph Twitchell
Ralph Twitchell is less famous than Rudolph, but he was the older and more established of the two when they began their partnership. He had been practicing in Sarasota since the 1930s, and he brought to the partnership a knowledge of local conditions — the climate, the materials, the contractors — that Rudolph lacked.
Twitchell's independent work is less well documented than Rudolph's, but the buildings he designed on his own are worth attention. They are quieter than Rudolph's, less interested in formal innovation, more focused on the practical problem of making a comfortable building in a difficult climate.
Victor Lundy
Victor Lundy is the least known of the major Sarasota School architects, which is a significant injustice. His buildings are among the most inventive of the period: expressive, structurally daring, and deeply responsive to their sites. His church buildings in particular — the First Unitarian Church in Westport, Connecticut; the St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Sarasota — are masterpieces of mid-century American religious architecture.
What Survives
The survival rate of Sarasota School buildings is not good. Many of the early houses have been demolished, altered beyond recognition, or allowed to deteriorate. The Riverview High School, designed by Rudolph in 1958, is still in use but has been significantly modified. The Umbrella House was moved from its original site.
The buildings that have survived in the best condition are generally those that have been recognized as significant and that have found owners willing to invest in their maintenance. The Healy Guest House has been carefully restored. Several of the Twitchell and Rudolph houses are in private ownership and in reasonable condition.
The lesson is familiar: buildings survive when someone fights for them. The Sarasota School has had its advocates, and some of the buildings have survived because of their efforts. But the attrition continues, and the window for preservation is closing.