I have been thinking about the Sarasota School a lot lately, partly because I spent two days in January visiting the surviving buildings and partly because the contrast between what those architects were doing and what is being built in Florida now is so stark.
The Sarasota School architects were solving a real problem: how to build comfortable buildings in a hot, humid climate without air conditioning. The solutions they developed — deep overhangs, louvered screens, cross-ventilation, careful orientation — are not complicated. They are the product of careful attention to site and climate.
What Changed
What changed was air conditioning. Once air conditioning became cheap and widely available in the late 1950s and 1960s, the incentive to design for the climate disappeared. You could build a sealed box anywhere in Florida and make it comfortable by running the air conditioning. The result is the Florida built environment we have now: buildings that are indifferent to their climate, that could be anywhere, that have no relationship to the place they are in.
Air conditioning solved the comfort problem and created an architecture problem. The two are not the same problem.
The Sarasota School buildings are a reminder that it did not have to be this way. They are proof that you can build beautifully in Florida, that the climate is not an obstacle but a condition to be engaged with. The fact that we stopped engaging with it is a choice, not a necessity.