Max Strang wants to give Florida architecture roots, or rather, reefs. Working with the arrangements of white planes that have become the building blocks of a certain manner of residential living along the coast, he grounds those abstractions with slabs of keystone or oolite, which are essentially blocks of the state’s geology, shades them with wood or concrete slats that mimic the semi-tropical vegetation of the area and builds them up to escape the sea that threatens to wash all human-made structures there away before too long. Within the resulting constructions, he opens views to the water and frames the lives of inhabitants with wood. Catering to wealthy clients while considering the nature of Florida’s culture, Strang seeks to build components for what might be the architecture of its seaside living.
What distinguishes Strang’s work in the particular environment in which he works is the combination of elemental forms or containers that encompass the major pieces of his programs, the thinness of the connective devices, and the manner in which these parts are rooted to place and climate through the addition of strong foundations, stone walls, and wood slats or screens. Woven together with details that balance these aspects of the architecture, his houses have the quality and finish his clients expect, while also responding to a wider context and tradition.
In that sense, Max Strang is particularly interested in finding ways to take the modernist monumentality and bravura hedonism of the so-called Sarasota School of Architecture, with which he grew up and to which he continues to have direct ties, forward into the 21st century and southward to the low-lying areas of Southern Florida – which, though he himself has moved back to Sarasota, is where most of his work is situated today.
Strang’s affiliation with one of the members of the Sarasota School, Gene Leedy, in his native Winter Haven, and the wider horizons that opened up to him with experience and his later training beyond Florida, have been particularly important for his development as an architect. The initial contact with Leedy was direct and two-pronged: Strang’s parents commissioned Leedy to design a house for their family, and it was in this concrete courtyard structure, much grander in its appearance than its relatively small square footage (5,000) would suggest, that the future architect spent his formative years. The combination of large structure and small spaces hidden within the crooks of these geometries, the play of volumes against each other in light and shadow, and the sequence of rooms, from private to family-oriented, that surrounded the captured landscape within the building, continue to resonate with him and in his work.
Moreover, Leedy’s son became Strang’s best friend and as a result he spent much of his youth visiting the architect’s own house. A structure that is more modest in scale and more reduced in its style than the place where he grew up, this house itself was part of a small community in which Leedy had designed all the homes, creating the sense of the extensive and modular nature of his approach to architecture. With a strong preference for expressive structure and light infill, and with a sense of rhythm developed over a long career of designing hundreds of structures in the same area, Leedy was able to imbue in Strang the importance of having a modernist discipline that had a similar combination of variety and drama.
It was a modernism of a particular kind, which responded to the site, climate, and somewhat ramshackle traditions of the Sarasota area with wood and later concrete frames. These established not just a system of support, but also a way of visually and spatially framing rooms so that they could be clearly defined, and yet open to both each other and the views of the water that were the raison d’etre for much of the residential work. Within those often-expansive grids, architects such as Gene Leedy kept the divisions as light and permeable as possible. What was particular to Leedy in his residential work was the emphasis on a contrast in scale and weight to the larger rooms, so that his houses had a layering that the more clearly expressive structures designed by the likes of Paul Rudolph lacked.
Equally important to Strang’s architecture, though he did not realize this until later, was the fact that Winter Haven is located near Florida’s highest point. This spine, which runs down only one part of the peninsula, creates not only different soil conditions and even climates, but also grounds its structures in a rock base that Strang went on to seek in Miami. When you drive around Southern Florida with the architect, he is always careful to point out the more modest ridges and ledges in what most of us think of as that generically low-lying coastal town, and he clearly loves the permanence, sense of distance, and prospect that such sites provide.
Ultimately, Strang believes, though, such low remains of reefs will not suffice as sea levels keep rising, and he sees the state’s destiny as leading back inevitably to the elevation where he grew up. A confluence of his love for Leedy and this belief has already led him to purchase his mentor’s house, and to develop other projects in the place he grew up – including plans for a redevelopment of the site where his childhood house is located. A final part of what came to make up Strang’s architecture was his experience in New York and London. After learning the basic lessons of architecture in Gainesville at the University of Florida, he decamped for Columbia University just as the digital revolution was being spearheaded there at the so-called “paperless studios” led by Greg Lynn and Hani Rashid in the early 1990s. Strang apprenticed with firms that took the introduction of digital modes of presentation and production in two directions: for the New York firm SHoP, headed by graduates of the paperless studios, and for Zaha Hadid, who taught at Columbia during this period. While the former’s early work explored modes of mass production, componentizing, and other extensions of abstraction and minimalism in an orthogonal mode, the latter helped him understand the expressive possibilities of architecture.
Returning to Florida (though he also lived in Colorado for several years), he moved to the then-booming town of Miami and, while working for local architects, gained important insights in how to respond to local conditions in a more legal and social sense by serving on a local planning commission. He also found himself in one of the rare places in the United States (and most of the world) that had a local tradition of streamlined, simplified, and boxy forms that eschewed references to styles imported from other sites in favor of a straightforward response to the openness of the sea, bay, or waterway in relationship to the tight sites that afforded views to that aqueous landscape. Though the majority of homes wealthy clients commissioned still sought to subsume modern building methods with Spanish or even French-derived decoration, there was enough of a desire among wealthy clients to continue the work of the 1920s and its revival in the 1950s and 1960s to give Strang the chance to begin to show what he could do in that mode.
With the design of his own house in Coconut Grove in 2004, Strang’s work took a leap forward. As is the case for many young architects, this self-commission gave him a chance to experiment and push his ideas further in a manner that worked for others did not. His response was to subsume the white planes and simple geometries that then and now mark much of his work in favor of a rectangular block covered completely in oolite. By now completely subsumed by vegetation, the house appears as ancient and enigmatic, extending the ground on which it is built into a haven for family life. Out of this block then emerges not a smoother “piano nobile” or main floor, but a porch, shaded by rusted steel beams, that extends the length of the house and provides a sequence of outdoor spaces for family gatherings, retreat, and entertaining.
The effect is dramatic. It pulled Strang towards the introduction of more such weight and openness and gave him the confidence to assert spatial sequences that were at least as dramatic as those in which he had grown up. The house also became a perfect calling card, allowing him to advertise his abilities and vision. It is fitting that a neighbor has commissioned him to design a new version of the house next door, giving Strang the chance to begin to replicate Leedy’s creation of a neighborhood around his own house.
Equally important is the lush landscaping, designed by Raymond Jungles. With a penchant for clumping together layers of vegetation that is a lush as he can make it, while exploiting the presence of the stone right below the surface to create drama through the terracing of different areas in a pattern hopscotching around the gardens, Raymond’s work is the perfect extension of and sometimes counterpoint to Strang’s work. The oolite, which has become a hallmark of so much of Strang’s work, extends that sense of the presence of the ground into the houses itself. Both here and in some of the related stone the architect also uses, you can see the presence of marine creatures in the material itself, while the color of the material, especially as it ages over time, brings a sense of the often-unseen ground from which structures rise in Southern Florida into the body of the home.
In many ways, though, the house is exceptional in Strang’s work not only in its massive appearance but also, and the two are clearly related, because of his site. In most of the architect’s other work, the condition in which he finds himself working is that of a restricted, often narrow lot whose front, or land side is dominated by a garage and restricted by local ordinances. By contrast, the side that faces the ocean, one of the bays on which he works, a canal or the Intracoastal Waterway, is where the architecture opens up and the structure dissolves as much as possible to the view. As a result, the recipe for his houses is a closed presentation of service and preliminary elements, with minimal windows, to the street, through which you slip into either a foyer or an introductory courtyard, before proceeding towards a living area facing the water.
That space and most of the remainder of the houses’ rooms are almost always lifted onto what Strang calls “the Miami first floor'': a datum high enough to be above what the U.S. Corps of Engineers consider it to be the floodplain. Everything below that line could flood, and Strang (and other local architects) uses that fact as an excuse to create gardens punctuated by concrete and often sculpturally expressed support, as well as dramatic stairs that lead you up into the living areas. You thus find yourself moving through and up a zone of heavy supports and lush landscape, up a staircase, either stretching up in wood or spiraling through the space, and past the service areas. At the end of sequence, on the second, water-facing level, the architecture opens up, dissolves, and also becomes more formal in its organization. It is here that the public spaces, after all, are located, and it is also this façade (in a reversal of the traditional villa or chateau model, which presents the formal front to the street before becoming more informal to the rear) that more people will see.
This organization is on full display in what is probably the largest single-family residential compound Strang has designed to date. Called Five Palms, it was built as three separate structures over a period of several years. Now that the whole composition is complete, it presents a miniature version of a neighborhood of intersecting horizontal and vertical planes, woven together densely to form a street façade punctuated by vegetation. You move into the realm of the house through a small courtyard, in which the stone and plaster planes intensify their intersections around you. Enter into the house proper (in this case on the ground level), and the water beckons at the end of the vista, drawing you past the more service-oriented spaces to the open backyard and view of the bay captured between Miami Beach and the mainland. The same sequence repeats itself in the other structures, with variations that bring the most out of each of their particular scales and orientations.
The most extreme version of this kind of composition, so elaborate at Five Palms, is on view in the Canal House. A very large house surrounded by more modest homes, the structure presents itself to the street as a one-story pavilion. Its modest façade is more open (though sheltered from the road) than most of Strang’s designs, and more dramatic. You enter between two pools of water, drawn by a view of the water beyond, while you can also see two of the ancillary living spaces to either side. You then proceed to the main house, which is a two-story rectangle defined by simple, extended planes held up by columns. The Canal House is simpler, despite its scale, in its organization than many of Strang’s designs, eschewing the offset, slightly winding pathway that has you become aware of walls and planes as you move through the space in favor of a more relaxed drama. Largely symmetrical, open, and sweeping in the freedom of the planes, the Canal House is thus also an unusually grand version of Strang’s architecture.
Strang and his team spend as much time on the interiors of these homes as they do on the exteriors, although in many cases a separate interior decorator adds their own designs over the team’s initial suggestions. What remains of the firm’s vision is not only the extraordinary level of finishes, but also the extensive use of wood to emphasize mainly horizontal planes, which can include both floors and ceilings; stone elements that emphasize the vertical landscape rising both outside and inside the house; and white-painted stucco or drywall pieces that do the actual work of defining and framing the various functional spaces. When there is an important feature in the room, such as a row of kitchen equipment or the bed in the principal bedroom, Strang likes to frame that moment in an extra portal of wood.
A more compact and perhaps more dramatic version of this organization is evident in the Macedo House. The house consists of two wings that extend out to enclose a central courtyard to the rear, which Strang, in another subtle theme, lifted several steps above the expansive lawn and pool to which it opens. When you approach the house, the structure is simpler, presenting you with an opening between two stone walls, while a concrete lintel connects the two over your head.
Beyond, the house develops into two wings of bedrooms with living space in the middle. The rear façade is unusually informal (perhaps because this is a landlocked site). Wings of unequal length are almost completely open, with their glass walls sheltered behind fins that provide both structure and shade and form a pattern that shifts along the length of the façade.
These fins have become central to Strang’s architecture, providing a counterpoint to the stone walls and wood planes while containing the white boxes or volumes. Sometimes they develop into a formal colonnade Strang carries out in stone, as in the Janoura House, while at other times they are wood infill that serves both to mitigate the sunshine from which the state derives its nickname and to break up the expanses of the façade. Strang almost never uses them as freestanding, structural elements. Nor are they, except in rare cases, purely decorative sunscreens. They have a middle, and ambivalent scale, somewhere between being their own building elements and being additions.
That ambivalence or in-between scale is, in fact, central to the success of many of Strang’s best works. Because of the interplay of stone, wood, stucco or drywall elements, and the slats, composed into wings that define captured space and only come together where there is a long view into a grander structure, and because of the continual shifts in axis and levels Strang uses to compose all these pieces together, the buildings he designs never have the simplicity or monumentality that overwhelms the work of some of his contemporaries, while the structures still have moments of sweep, release, as well as an impressive scale that marks them as significant (at least to their owners) structures.
In more recent work, Strang has been exploring more expressive forms, while also looking to broaden the reach of his work. The most significant new form he is now employing is the boomerang or slow curve, which first became evident in a house he designed in Fort Lauderdale, River’s Reach, and which is on full display in a home, currently under construction, on an isolated lot in the Florida Keys. The shape is an outgrowth of the liberation of the main living floor the “Florida First Floor” makes possible. Because the main area is lifted towards the view and away from the structure on which it rests, it can gesture towards the view and expand its spaces to make full use of what the users can see from the inside. The soft curves this overall shape creates also allow Strang to present the offset of vertical and horizontal planes in different materials with less reliance on the intermediary boxes containing the rooms.
In addition to exploring the formal elements at his disposal, Strang is extending his reach beyond the realm of the single-family home. The largest and most ambitious of such experiments is the compound of several hundred homes he is designing for a Tesla-themed, golf-oriented residential development. In the manner that is typical in such speculative, but highly controlled ventures, Strang and his office have designed half a dozen homes, each of which is a variation on what he has created for specific clients before. These types are then spread throughout the winding roads of the neighborhood to avoid repetition, and home-buyers can choose both the type and the location. Because the architect can design them more or less in the abstract, the compositions of forms and elements are more pure and more carefully balanced than is the case in most of the firm’s designs for specific clients. The repetition of those pieces, meanwhile, promises to knit the whole area together with rhythms that extend across individual pieces, much in the way either some of the mid-century housing areas (including the one Leedy designed in Winter Haven), or the small art deco hotels of Miami Beach did.
A more compact version of such a multi-family design is the apartment building Strang has developed and built in Winter Haven itself. Recalling Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Housing in Detroit, it consists of units where the contrast between open and closed is created not by a horizontal sequence, but in the compacted relationship between living and sleeping areas in each unit. You enter these homes, moreover, through a small courtyard off the street, so that Strang is able to recreate in miniature the spatial relations his larger homes have.
Even more ambitious are Strang’s designs for all of Florida. Recognizing the need to rethink the larger metropolitan areas of his home state in the face of climate change, he has proposed an alternative to urban conglomerations such as that of Tampa-St. Pete’s, which extends down to the Sarasota area where he lives. Instead of sprawl that must run inland to avoid rising land costs and sea levels alike, he suggests that a future city could consist of circular islands surrounded by water and agriculture. Recalling both the Garden City plans that generated the modern suburbs and some of the more visionary Utopian images created by architects and filmmakers alike, while also resembling large versions of the humanmade islands, such as the Venetians, on which Strang continues to build houses, this is a vision you can easily imagine both evoking the semi-agricultural landscape in which Strang grew up and being filled in with the simple building elements woven together in complex compositions that has been the mark of his contribution to contemporary residential design.
That sense of compaction and release, rooting in place and weaving spaces together, leading finally to a sequence of captured nature, expansive places to live, and open and formal relations with a landscape defined by its relation to landscape, remains central to what Max Strang and his office do. Given the chance to play their architecture out over countless homes throughout Florida, they are continually experimenting with new ways to define and relate these pieces to each other. An extension of such experimentation beyond the realm of the single-family home seems imminent in the practice, and certainly will lead to contributions at a larger scale to the landscape of the Sunshine State.
Strang now lives in Sarasota, and is expanding his practice there. He is also reconnecting to his past, both by buying and preserving Leedy’s home in Winter Haven and by working with his siblings to redevelop his parents’ property. He is there sheltering in the broader Sarasota School as he spends weekend afternoons in one of the cabanas Paul Rudolph designed for a beach club there. How such a shift, as well as the continual expansion in scale and opportunities to build his office is experiencing will develop his architecture beyond its reef foundations will be a development worth watching.
