Three very different men created the famous Florida Architectural Style known as The Sarasota School.
Each city in Florida has its own image, the picture people conjure up in their minds when they hear its name. Orlando? Theme parks and magic castles. Miami? Salsa, glitz and glamour. The Villages? Senior citizens speeding around in golf carts. About the that men created the famous Florida architectural style known as the Sarasota School.
Sarasota may be the luckiest of all. Here the image is calm, restful and tasteful. Rich people relax in sleek modern homes. The blue-green bay shimmers in the background as Art is discussed—both the kind that hangs on their walls and their grandson Art, who plays lacrosse at Choate.
But few of its present-day inhabitants realize the city’s reputation for cultural sophistication rests not only on its famous Ringling Museum and various arts institutions, but on an architectural movement that was the creation of three men in the middle of the 20th century. Eventually comprised of 15 or so young architects, that movement became known as the Sarasota School of Architecture. Now recognized as the pinnacle of mid-century modernism, Sarasota School buildings were spare, crisp, simple and elegant; and they made Sarasota one of the architectural capitals of post-war America and an unusual outlier of progressive taste.
Fate put the three founders in the right place at the right time, and each contributed a crucial element.
The “father”—also referred to as the “dean” and sometimes the “grandfather”—was Ralph Twitchell, an architect and builder who was both ambitious and innovative. He set the stage for what was about to happen. The artistic genius of the trio was Paul Rudolph, now recognized as one of America’s greatest—and most controversial—modernists. He found his first job—and his vision—in Sarasota. And the man who gave the Sarasota School credibility and prestige was Phillip Hiss, a colorful designer/entrepreneur driven by a mission to improve the world.
The town was their perfect petri dish. Smallish, surrounded by beautiful waters and off the beaten track, it had attracted a certain sort of resident since its early days. Bertha Palmer arrived from Chicago in 1909 and set the tone. She was rich, a patron of the arts and an early ecologist—and, incidentally, the inventor of the brownie. True, her architectural taste was a bit over the top. Her home in Chicago was a massive pile of stone towers and embellishments, but her collection of Impressionist paintings and Rodin sculptures more than made up for that lapse.
Palmer bought 80,000 acres of land and built a neo-colonial-style home just south of town. Soon her Midwestern friends were flocking to Sarasota and creating a society of quiet money and elegant living. The Ringling Brothers arrived shortly after Palmer. Their money was not so quiet. Their circus livened the town up and gave it a creative edge and a slightly bohemian flavor. Other big money arrived, including members of the Marshall Field family and inventor and entrepreneur Powel Crosley.
The town’s go-to architect was young Ralph Twitchell. From a well-to-do family in Ohio, he was educated at Columbia and came to Sarasota in 1925 to assist Dwight Baum with the construction of the Ca’ d’Zan, the 56-room mansion John Ringling was building. The style was Beaux Arts, in this case the Venetian Gothic version.
Twitchell became friends with the various Ringling brothers, who in addition to running the circus, were developing real estate all over town and making a fortune. At one point in the 1920s, John Ringling was considered the richest man in the United States.
Twitchell, a businessman as well as an architect, joined right in. He put together 13 lots north of town and called the development Ravellan Gardens. He built eight houses in the Spanish style. But then came the land bust of 1927, and he was stuck with four of them. He and his family had to move into one.
More than most architects, Twitchell was also a builder. His specialty was handling the hot, wet climate, and after he built the Ravellan Gardens houses he realized they weren’t right: The walls were too thick, the windows were too small, the roofs had no overhangs to protect from the sun.
Twitchell not only came to understand the Southwest Florida climate; he had what one writer called “a unique understanding of local materials,” including cypress wood and Ocala block. In the 1930s he helped develop the Lamolithic system of building, which involved the use of poured concrete. His expertise got him into trouble with the American Institute of Architects. They were suspicious of architects who also made money in construction and suspended his membership. (They restored it in 1976, two years before he died, with groveling apologies.)
Twitchell moved with the times stylistically. His Spanish Revival period ended; and after a brief detour into ranch houses, he began to experiment with modernism. Another charter member of the Sarasota intelligentsia, MacKinlay Kantor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, hired him to design a luxurious home on Siesta Key that had a hint of Frank Lloyd Wright and a hint of Clifford May, the father of the California ranch house. It incorporated many of the building techniques that Twitchell had been experimenting with. Twitchell was now a modernist.
His office in 1936 gives us a glimpse of his new style. The office was air-conditioned—a great rarity at the time—and all white, even the furniture. There was one abstract painting and a blue-green rug. He used the same blue-green in all his houses, as a band around the top of all the interior walls. Color obsessed him, and he could spend hours choosing the right shade.
Twitchell was also a romantic. His office, says John Howey in his book, The Sarasota School of Architecture, 1941-1966, functioned as “a small atelier—he even had a cook/handyman on the premises…employees would periodically gather with him for supper and for a discussion of current events and architectural philosophy.”
And business was getting better. The war in Europe was giving Florida a new life as a resort for Americans unable to travel abroad. Well-to-do Northerners wanted simple beach houses they could escape to during the winter, and Twitchell was the best architect in town. In fact, he was the only architect in town.
Twitchell decided he needed an assistant. He heard about a new graduate of the Alabama Polytechnical Institute. The 22-year-old was said to be a messy draftsman but had excellent design skills. His name was Paul Rudolph.
The second member of the Sarasota triumvirate was definitely not from a patrician background. Rudolph’s father was an itinerant preacher, and the family moved around a lot, mostly in the South. His mother was artistic and loved music, and Paul inherited these qualities. He was ambitious and smart, the sort of kid who got upset if he didn’t win first prize. He was also gay.
He graduated in 1941. His thesis was prescient: the use of glass in architecture. Through a mutual acquaintance he heard that Ralph Twitchell needed an assistant and he leapt at the opportunity. He’d seen Twitchell’s work in magazines and felt very in sync with the man 28 years his senior.
During Rudolph’s first five months in Sarasota, he and Twitchell designed four houses. They discovered they worked well together. Rudolph’s genius for design was apparent even then, and Twitchell let him run with it. Each new home was a little simpler, a little more pared down. They designed a house for the Twitchell family, and by this time their synergy was complete. You could see the Sarasota School coming to life. Then World War II broke out. Both entered the service and the future would have to wait.
Fast forward to 1945.
The end of World War II brought about a renaissance in American architecture. Almost nothing had been built in the past 15 years. First the Depression ended the demand for new houses, then the war had required all the country’s resources and talent. By the time peace finally arrived, an explosion of creativity was brewing.
Millions of GIs would be returning. They would start raising families. Where would they live?
Many lessons had been learned during the war. Technology had advanced decades in the space of five frantic years. New materials and new building techniques had been developed. How would they fit into this new housing world? And not incidentally, who would gain fame and fortune riding the upcoming wave?
People were discussing the “House of Tomorrow,” a smaller, modern house born of postwar demographics and wartime innovations, when Twitchell and Rudolph reconnected in 1947. Their war experiences had been grueling and dangerous—Rudolph would later die from the mesothelioma he contracted while working on naval ship design at the Brooklyn Naval Shipyards. Both were eager to make their way in this world of exciting possibilities.
A new style of homes beginning to gain notice in California defined the look of the House of Tomorrow. These were the famous Case Study Houses of Art and Architecture Magazine, with carefully balanced geometric rectangles, glass walls, atriums and wood or steel framing. They were remarkably like the homes Twitchell and Rudolph were designing in Sarasota, but here in Florida, the partners responded to the local climate, adding roof overhangs to keep out the sun and jalousie windows to improve airflow.
They helped pioneer the open floor plan so popular with HGTV viewers today and used panes of glass, often so large they required new engineering techniques, which helped provide illumination and blur the distinction between indoors and the semi-tropical outdoors.
In 1948, the partners came up with the definitive Florida version of the House of Tomorrow: the Revere Quality House on Siesta Key. A rectangle of 1,000 square feet, it boasted a concrete roof held up by tubular steel columns filled with concrete, so that the interior walls were not load- bearing.
The home was built as part of a promotional gimmick by the Revere Copper Company. They commissioned a series of new homes to showcase their copper plumbing and wiring. Siesta Key’s Revere House was a classic work of art, but it also had a touch of ballyhoo. It was open to the public and 16,000 people came to see it. Magazine articles and a series of national advertisements kept it in the spotlight for years.
The Revere House established Sarasota’s reputation as a place with interesting modern architecture. Other projects flowed out of the Twitchell-
Rudolph office, most notably the Cocoon House of 1950, which the partners—each a bit of a showman—once again used to get publicity. They invited the public to come and watch the spraying of the vinyl compound that would “cocoon” the house. It was a technique Rudolph had learned at the Brooklyn shipyard.
An added bonus: Rudolph’s drafting skills had improved tremendously. He turned out to be a great draftsman, one of the greatest, whose plans and drawings are highly valued today. Magazine editors loved to publish them for their beauty alone, and they brought the firm—and Rudolph in particular—even more attention.
By 1950 other young architects were starting to notice what was going on in Sarasota and came to join in. As one of them, William Rupp, put it, “We felt we had found The Answer.” Fueled by each other’s success and in some cases, a sort of informal competition, they thrived in the atmosphere of creative energy and designed homes, churches and businesses that won national attention.
But the new arrival who would make the most difference was not an architect at all. Phillip Hiss designed houses, true, but his background was that of a well-to-do patron of the arts. It was in this capacity that he would become the third leader of the Sarasota School and the one who would bring it even more recognition.
From a prominent family in New York, Hiss had a colorful background. He had traveled all around South America by motorcycle and then written a book about it. He spent time in Micronesia with Margaret Mead, studying Balinese architecture and culture. He was 40 years old when he settled in Sarasota, tall, dark and handsome. A social engineer by nature, he was ready to make a difference.
Hiss bought a sandbar at the north end of Lido Key and named it Lido Shores. He had a vision—a tropical subdivision of modern homes, all designed by the young architects. He knew them all—his wife, Shirley, was a good friend of Paul Rudolph, and Rudolph became his favorite. Hiss himself designed a lavish home for his family on a prime lot and it soon became a showplace of the new style. To entice buyers, he had Rudolph design a model home nearby, close enough to the main road to attract attention. It came to be called the Umbrella House because of the giant lattice work that screened the pool from the sun. The home would become another icon of modernism.
Hiss, who had a rich man’s desire to do good and lead the community, ran for the school board, and, much to everyone’s surprise, won. Once elected he discovered that the schools of Sarasota County were in terrible shape. They were poorly designed and maintained. “The restrooms were so bad,” he said, “that the kids wouldn’t even go to the bathroom.”
Hiss set about remedying the situation. He hired the young architects who were building his homes in Lido Shores to design a series of remarkable school buildings that had a profound influence on educational architecture and gave the Sarasota School, until then mainly known for beach homes for the wealthy, the gravitas it was lacking.
Hiss had a theory: A school building could educate through its design. To prove it he orchestrated a series of nine school buildings.
They were remarkably innovative. Englewood Elementary, designed by Jack West, featured a soaring roof line and spaces that could be used for a variety of purposes. Victor Lundy’s Alta Vista School had an indoor-outdoor design scheme. The high points of the Hiss building program were two extraordinary structures designed by Paul Rudolph. The first, Riverview High School, was a complex campus of elegant breezeways and outdoor corridors. The other, a major addition to Sarasota High School in 1960, had the unfortunate distinction of closing the glory days of the Sarasota School, when the roof started leaking and the concrete cracking.
In 1967 Hiss wrote an unhappy article for Architectural Forum about the end of the Sarasota School. Many of the young architects had left, and the school board had turned conservative. Builders had taken over. The city had surrendered to them.
Hiss went on to a new project, the establishment of New College, an innovative school focusing on a rigorous classical curriculum and individualized learning. He spent the rest of his life in Europe and California, living well and concentrating on his photography.
He may well be Florida’s greatest dilettante. He designed buildings better than most architects; he developed real estate but in the classiest way possible; he built schools based on his own educational theories; he helped found a famously unique college. And he drove the most beautiful Mercedes of all, the kind with the gull-wing doors. He died in 1988.
Rudolph went on to a bigger and more dramatic life than anything Sarasota might have to offer. He and Twitchell dissolved their partnership in 1951. Writer Paul Goldenberg speculates it was an “All About Eve” situation: The student had surpassed the teacher, with all the tension and jealousy that would provide.
Rudolph opened his own Sarasota office. But he was in town so little that he slept there, too, on a cot in back. He was becoming very famous. The architectural press took him up and he won all sorts of awards. Then in 1958, at 40 years of age, he became the chair of Yale’s architecture school. There he designed the architecture building itself, a jaw-dropping Brutalist structure. Critics saw chaos and homoerotic symbolism. The students hated it so much they set it on fire.
Many have compared Rudolph to Howard Roark, the tough and dogmatic hero of Ayn Rand’s classic novel, The Fountainhead. He was canonized, then vilified. Once the architectural press turned on him, he was considered everything that was wrong with modern architecture.
Rudolph died in 1997. His reputation has long since recovered. He had a renaissance in the ’90s with a series of spectacular skyscrapers in Asia, and he is now recognized as one of the great architects of his time. He is also revered by gay academics who see homosexual motifs in his work.
Indeed, his highly refined linear design—black leather, industrial carpeting, track lighting—was the look of gay New York (including Fire Island) in the 1970s and ’80s. Yet he remains an enigma—aloof, obsessive, frustratingly intellectual.
His mentor Ralph Twitchell stayed in Sarasota. He partnered with his son, Tollyn; retired in 1975; and died several years later in the Revere House, which had been his home for almost 20 years.
And what about the Sarasota School itself? How did it fare with the passage of time?
Not well at first. Modernism never really caught on with the general public; they preferred the homey ranch. And the advent of air conditioning made the modernist homes instantly obsolete. You didn’t have to worry about breezes and airflow anymore.
In 1995, architecture critic Richard Guy Wilson visited Sarasota and wrote, “In its native haunt the Sarasota School now appears to be an archeological artifact overwhelmed by suburban boxes.”
Many of the Sarasota School homes were torn down or remodeled into something else. Mostly this went unnoticed, but occasionally there was an outcry. Rudolph’s Riverview High School was torn down in 2009, a low point that the town looks back on with regret. Perhaps that’s why the Rudolph wing of Sarasota High, scheduled to be torn down, was spared and beautifully restored in 2012.
Several of the younger architects went on to variations of modernism and had successful careers, but the change the movement promised never really happened. Its subtle influence has been enormous, though. Many of its design elements have gone mainstream and are now ubiquitous—the open-concept plan, the sliding glass door.
And in the past decade, the school has been rediscovered. A number of significant Sarasota buildings are left, and they have become tourist attractions. MOD Weekend, sponsored by a group called Architecture Sarasota, attracts architecture fans for lectures, workshops and home tours. The Umbrella House still thrills passersby who see it from the road to Longboat Key. Rudolph’s addition to Sarasota High school has had its cracks repaired and is now back to its original purpose—educating students about aesthetics and beauty. The Revere House is still there, too, perfectly restored and now serving as a guest house to a 5,000-square-foot modernist mansion designed by a second-generation Sarasota schooler, Guy Peterson.
And as downtown Sarasota experiences a massive building boom, with new condos and hotels going up all over, the Sarasota School look is once again the latest thing—white walls, lines and planes, plate-glass windows. It fits in beautifully with the town’s new wave of tech executives and hip young entrepreneurs.
You see visual references to it everywhere. A new boutique hotel has even been named after it: Sarasota Modern. Sitting in its elegant lobby, it’s hard to believe that all this sprang from the synergy between a wealthy visionary, a business-minded architect and a 22-year-old college graduate, who in 1947 got off the train from Alabama, full of ideas and anxious to make a name for himself.
Robert Plunket is an architecture critic, magazine journalist and novelist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Barron’s and the Atlantic. New Directions Publishing recently reissued his novels My Search for Warren Harding and Love Junkie.