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TRAVEL GETAWAYS
Design Destination: Sarasota's '50s Architecture
 The north and south walls of the Umbrella House in Lido Key are constructed almost entirely of jalousies. |
For sophisticated tourists, the excitement of 1958 Florida gleams in Sarasota architecture. The Bauhaus beach houses and progressive public buildings that thrilled midcentury America still provide an extra attraction and inspiration for 21st-century dreamers.
To see the work of Paul Rudolph, the genius who studied under legendary Walter Gropius at Harvard and later headed Yale’s architecture school, take a leisurely drive through Lido Shores, in the mangroves just off St. Armand’s Circle. Forget the mansions on the water; small one- and two-story houses on the winding interior streets are the soul of Sarasota modernism.
Here are almost a dozen houses by the architects in the Sarasota School of Architecture, precise blocks of geometry, suspended in sun and sand and surrounded and shaded by lush undergrowth. At the Umbrella House, built to lure ’50s home buyers, Rudolph opened the crisp rectangular boxes of the International style to Florida’s untamed nature. With no air conditioning, Rudolph and his colleagues used open patios, decks, overhanging trellises, screens, grilles, cantilevering and sliding glass walls to let light and shadow play. While other modernists built glass houses so inhabitants could see outside, the Sarasota architects let the outside in, with all its breezes, sounds and smells, through jalousies and casement.
Siesta and Casey Key and Boca Grande offer more small houses with sharp planes, thin columns and ordinary materials of concrete, plywood and glass, lots of glass. The neutral shades are broken by spare blocks of red or yellow, riotous Florida foliage and singular artwork, modern and primitive, like museum pavilions in the jungle.
In the hands of Victor Lundy, modernism took different shapes, swooping and organic, best seen on the campus of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on Bahia Vista Street. The vast curved roof of laminated wood looks like the hull of a beautiful Scandinavian ship, floating on invisible glass walls and anchored in ungarnished concrete.
A few blocks away are more public moderns, Rudolph’s cubist addition to Sarasota High School or the winged Alta Vista Elementary. In a burst of midcentury optimism, architecture patron Philip Hiss of Lido Shore led a boom in open schools designed with protected walks, breezeways and courtyards.
How did little Sarasota draw a gallery of architects, like Rudolph, Lundy, Tim Seibert, Gene Leedy and more? The early tycoons, Palmers, Fields and especially the Ringlings of circus fortune first made the town a winter home for elegance and the arts, from theater to grand mansions like Ca d’Zan. That attracted artists and writers like McKinlay Kantor, and then, in 1940, the first young architects, who were also thrilled that the great Frank Lloyd Wright was designing Florida Southern College in Lakeland.
Sarasota’s Historic Spanish Point museum has a fabulous photo exhibit of Rudolph works on display through September.
 The Umbrella House — built before air conditioning — and pool were originally shaded from the sun by a trellis structure, which became known as the umbrella. |
