“The regionalism of liberation...is the manifestation of a region that is especially in tune with the emerging thought of the time. It is the genius of this region to be more than ordinarily aware and more than ordinarily free. Its virtue is that its manifestation has significance for the world outside itself. To express this regionalism architecturally it is necessary that there be buildings—preferably a lot of buildings—at one time. Only so can the expression be sufficiently general, sufficiently varied, sufficiently forceful to capture people’s imaginations... A region promotes ideas. A region accepts ideas. Imagination and intelligence are necessary for both... To be expressed, an idea must be built; to be built, it must be particularized, localized, set within a region. And what is important are not the limitations of the region but the resources of the region. A region’s most important resources are its free minds, its imagination, its stake in the future, its energy, and, last of all, its climate, its topography, and the particular kinds of sticks and stones it has to build with... For an architecture to be really great it must express the variety, freedom, expansiveness, and love of the physical world that are the product of the best regionalism—the regionalism of liberation.”
—Harwell Hamilton Harris
In a 1954 lecture on the theme of “regionalism,” the architect and educator Harwell Hamilton Harris outlined two types of regionalism that have particular pertinence for the evolution of modern architecture in Florida, a living tradition of practice that continues in the contemporary work of architects such as Max Strang. Harris began his lecture by stating that regionalism in architecture is not so much the result of “climate, geography, the presence or absence of certain materials,” as it is the result of the attitude of those who practice architecture—“regionalism is a state of mind.” Harris defines the “regionalism of restriction” as being focused on continuing traditions and “living patterns rooted in a vanished past,” and which “cares more for preserving an obscure dialect than for expressing an idea.”2 A regionalism of restriction, being fixed and unchanging, resists and rejects new ideas coming from outside. On the other hand, a regionalism of liberation, as described above, being a living and constantly evolving tradition, engages new ideas, incorporates what is appropriate and transforms the new ideas by grounding them in the characteristics of the region.
For the last hundred years, and through many generations, the works of the best Florida practitioners have exemplified modern architecture’s characteristics of engagement and enhancement of the environment; forthright expression of construction and authenticity of materials; ability to house new and differing lifestyles; spatial freedom combined with a sense of place; and reinforcement of our identity as those who in fact live in the modern age. As an example of the regionalism of liberation, modern architecture continues to be uniquely capable of making places where contemporary cultural, social, and domestic aspirations are realized in harmony with the climate, topography and environment of Florida. Modern
architecture in Florida, in both historical and contemporary examples, demonstrates the significant benefits of an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, development of architecture. This is because, like all living traditions and constructive disciplines, modern architecture cannot survive without its being put into practice by each new generation of architects, as Harris noted; “To be expressed, an idea must be built; to be built, it must be particularized, localized, set within a region.” It is only through this kind of engagement in a particular place by each new generation that modern architecture is grounded, transformed and reborn.
The new generation of younger architects, such as Max Strang, whose practices were established in the last twenty years, start from a uniquely optimistic and constructive position with respect to the tradition of modern architecture that they have inherited. The work of Strang’s generation epitomizes the fusion of continuity and tradition at the heart of modern architecture, as realized through their spirited and constructive rediscovery of a modern architecture that was seen as exhausted by some among previous generations of practitioners. The relevance of the distinction between regionalisms of “restriction” and “liberation” to contemporary Florida architecture may be recognized in the recent architectural history of the “project of modernity.” The architects of Harris’s generation engaged regionalism as a way to counter the dominant influence in the mid-20th century of the so-called “International Style,” a type of architecture intended—as its name clearly indicates—to be the same everywhere in the world, and recognizable today as a precursor of “globalization.” This struggle to redefine and return to the roots of modern architecture was waged by such diverse characters as Frank Lloyd Wright, Lewis Mumford, the originator of the concept of “regionalism” in the 1930s, and Sigfried Giedion, the founder of CIAM, whose 1954 Architectural Record essay, “Forget the International Style: The Regional Approach,” marked an important change of direction for the preeminent historian of modernism. It should be remembered that fifty years earlier, Wright and his mentor Louis Sullivan had fought a very similar battle against the then-dominant influence of the École des Beaux Arts, which, as the first true “international style,” similarly intended to promulgate a universally-identical architecture uniform in form and articulation, irrespective of here and when it was built.
Despite the efforts of its critics, in the years after WWII International Style modernism was adopted as a stylistic formula by most large corporate practices, resulting in the 1960s and 1970s being a period dominated by a formalist “late-modernism.” There followed a series of stylistic pendulum swings within large parts of the architectural profession, beginning with historicist “post-modernism,” purportedly “humanizing” architecture through the application of superficially “historical” forms, which dominated the 1980s. Historicism was in turn superseded by “deconstructivism,” an ethically vacuous celebration of the purported “fragmentation” of contemporary life through the manipulation of exterior form and surface, which dominated the 1990s. During this period, with the focus on the succession of superficial stylistic changes, the fundamental disciplinary principles of environmental engagement and experiential enrichment effectively ceased to be a priority for both education and practice.
Here it should be pointed out that, like the Beaux Arts and the International Style before them, both historicist post-modernism and deconstructivism were not so much products of the practicing profession as they were of architecture schools and museums. During Harris’s time as dean at University of Texas in the early 1950s, the architect Bernhard Hoesli, who had worked with Alvar Aalto before joining the faculty, argued that “what is wrong with architecture today” could not be found in schools, for in that period schools modeled their teaching directly on practice. Hoesli believed that professional practice and architectural education had distinctly different agendas, and that architectural history, ethics, intellectual content, social responsibility and cultural meaning, as well as the continuation of the “incomplete project of modernity” (as Jürgen Habermas would later call it), must be engaged in schools in order to ground the practice of architecture in fundamental disciplinary principles. This interpretation was echoed by the architect Louis Kahn, who memorably stated; “The profession is in the marketplace—architecture belongs to the university.”
Unfortunately for the discipline of architecture, Hoesli’s balanced conception of the relation between the profession and schools never became the norm, and instead the situation was merely reversed, so that from the 1960s to the 1990s, “what was wrong with architecture” could be found not in practice but in the schools, the products of which the profession employed as formal models. This resulted in a fundamental disengagement of theory from practice, with schools separating thinking and making, and generating theories entirely unrelated to practice. Yet, as the architect David Chipperfield wrote in 1994, any theory as to the nature of architecture should be generated from practice, and not the other way around. Like the profession, trends in schools are also subject to extreme swings, as noted by the historian Joan Ockman, who, in editing a recent history of architectural education in America, found that the separation of theory from practice in academia reached its most extreme point during the late 1990s, leading to what she called “the exhaustion of theory” in architectural education, which was followed by a renewed engagement of practice in schools.
Yet even during the most contentious periods, a few schools maintained a balanced relationship between theory and practice, and between the academy and the profession, and it was these schools that served as the models for many others once the renewed engagement of practice began in the late 1990s. It was the constructively critical and profoundly optimistic engagement of the best professional practices by the best schools of architecture that provided the context in which many of the architects of Max Strang’s generation were educated. Unlike their predecessors, their architectural education was informed by schools simultaneously engaging fundamental disciplinary principles (as called for by Hoesli), taking on the challenges facing the discipline, and inviting the best practicing professionals to participate in both the teaching of studios and the criticism of student projects. As a result of their constructive architectural education, and the ensuing positive transition to professional practice, today the best young Florida architects begin with the fundamentally optimistic and constructive belief that modern architecture is a shared discipline to be practiced. In their
2001 book, Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization, Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis argued that “next to the great ideological struggle between modernism and traditionalism, the conflict between regionalism and globalism has shaped most social, political, economic and cultural debates of the past century,” and that tropical critical regional architecture is one of the few examples of contemporary design that appropriately adapts modern architecture to its particular environment and place, and thereby constructively grounds “universal civilization” within “local culture.” Regional architecture, as defined by the cultural critic Lewis Mumford in 1941, constructs buildings “which most closely meet the actual conditions of life and which most fully succeed in making people feel at home in their environment.” The best architecture being realized in Florida today re-establishes the regional environmental paradigms inherent in ancient ways of building, of minimal energy use, employment of recycled and renewable materials, maintaining ecological balance, passive tempering of climate, and appropriate infusion of daylight into the interior. A core attribute of the architecture of the regionalism of liberation is its “love of the physical world.” Architecture that lasts is grounded in its place, uses minimal resources and has minimal impact on the environment, and provides maximal engagement of its environment and maximal enrichment of experience for its inhabitants.
Rather than a style or set of universally-applicable formal elements lodged in a particular moment in architectural history, as it is too often characterized, the modern can perhaps more appropriately be defined as the architecture of both its time and its place. This is exemplified in the building and thinking of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose works of the early years of the 20th century both inspired and initiated the evolution of modern architecture, and whose influence on the modern architects of Florida—where he built the largest number of his buildings in any one place, Lakeland—is impossible to overestimate. Wright consistently defined architecture as the joining of exterior environment to interior life, writing in his 1954 book, The Natural House; “The Usonian House, then, aims to be a natural performance, one that is integral to the site; integral to the environment; integral to the life of the inhabitants.” The nurturing aspect of a dwelling for its inhabitants was critical for Wright, who argued; “Whether people are fully conscious of this or not, they actually derive countenance and sustenance from the ‘atmosphere’ of the things they live in or with. They are rooted in them just as a plant is rooted in the soil in which it is planted.”
Wright also emphasized the importance of the relationship between the building and its place on the earth; “We start with the ground... In any and every case the character of the site is the beginning of the building that aspires to architecture.” Wright believed that all rooms of the house should be oriented to receive sun at appropriate times during the day; “The sun is the great luminary of all life. It should serve as such in the building of any house.”The ideal of intertwining the architectural interior, and the life that takes place in the space within, with the exterior environment in which it was built, was one of the primary themes of modern architecture, articulated at its beginning by Wright; “We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside, and the inside
may and does go outside. They are of each other.” Wright emphasized the importance of integrating the interior of the house with the exterior environment. In this the architect should, “make the garden be the building as much as the building will be the garden, the sky as treasured a feature of daily indoor life as the ground itself.” It therefore comes as no surprise that Wright was adamantly opposed to both the flattening of landscape contours and the mechanical control of climate; “To me air-conditioning is a dangerous circumstance... I think it is far better to go with the natural climate than to try to fix a special artificial climate of your own. Climate means something to man. It means something in relation to one’s life in it.”
Yet, despite Wright’s influential built works that exemplified his ideal of “the natural house,” during the fifty-seven years since his death the majority of buildings have been designed to address another paradigm—the uniform mechanical heating and cooling of all interior spaces. The mechanical air-conditioning of interior spaces, and the resulting hermetic sealing of buildings, effectively cuts the occupants off from any contact (other than visual, through glass windows) with their climate and environment. This change radically altered our experience of place, from one where human comfort in the tropics depended on architecture in its provision of porosity to prevailing breezes and shade of roof overhangs, to one where human comfort became almost entirely independent of architecture, reliant instead on the thermostat regulating the hermetically sealed interior. That this cutting off of interiors from their environments occurred simultaneously with the rise of the profession of “interior design” and the definition of architecture as being concerned only with “the last six inches”—the building skin and the exterior form, is hardly coincidental.
The mechanical air-conditioning of hermetically sealed interior spaces has been paralleled by related practices equally destructive of the relation of interior experience to exterior environment, in particular the flattening and re-grading of existing natural topography in order to accept the construction of pre-determined and non-site-specific floor plans, as well as the parallel removal of indigenous trees and vegetation and their replacement with non- native decorative “landscaping.” Equally deleterious has been the disappearance of locally sourced building materials and regional traditions of building, and their replacement by universally available prefabricated materials and assembly systems, which has in turn enabled the emergence of de-contextualized, de-natured and de-historicized architectural “styles” intended to house a so-called “globalized” lifestyle. The buildings that result can in fact be constructed anywhere, and thus those inhabiting them are, quite literally, nowhere. Aldo van Eyck argued that the worst damage done to the daily lives of people by modern universal civilization was the result of “its capacity to create ‘nowhere’ everywhere.” That these buildings are not ecologically “sustainable” by any definition of the word is clear, but equally deleterious is the way they emaciated experience by denying the unfortunate occupants of their interiors any sensory engagement of the environment that lies just outside their glass windows.
Before air-conditioning, uniformly flat site grading, “landscaping” and universal building systems and materials together made all places and climates alike and separated interior inhabitants from their place in the exterior natural world, architects had no choice but to engage their climate and natural context. This was an environmental imperative, in response to which the first generations of modern architects in Florida tended to engage the local traditions of ecologically appropriate building. In this effort, both the vernacular and the work of predecessors was critical to learning methods of design and construction that would last, as well as techniques for the appropriate engagement of climate. The majority of early modern Florida architecture was built largely before air-conditioning, and its architects of necessity employed such place-specific and experientially beneficial aspects as solar orientation, tree shading and prevailing breezes—as well as the sounds and smells of the environment they carried—nestling their buildings into their sites and adjusting them to its nature. This sense of natural economy as an ethic of building—gaining the maximum benefit for the inhabitants of its interiors, in terms of the enrichment of the daily rituals of life over the lifetime of a building, from the least energy and material investment—has always been part of modern architecture that has lasted.
The first generations of modern architects practicing in Florida, while committed to the liberative spatial and social characteristics of modernism, were at the same time acutely aware of the lessons to be learned from those who had inhabited the place before them. The European settlers of Florida, by necessity, developed a way of building appropriate to the hot, humid subtropical climate and abundance of wood. Their so-called “Cracker Houses” provided shading, engaged prevailing breezes, and encouraged air-flow through un-insulated metal roofs whose superheated surfaces exhausted hot air from the top while drawing in cool air from the shadowed area beneath the elevated wood floor. These designs were engaged in the work of many modern architects, including the Miami architect Rufus Nims, who pointed out the lessons to be learned from them in his article, “Indigenous Architecture of South Florida.” In this essay, extensively illustrated with plans, sections and diagrams of the environmental behavior of buildings, Nims argued against the increasingly typical air-conditioning of houses in Florida. His opposition was not primarily due to the energy costs entailed, but, more importantly, was because of the loss of the inhabitants’ full-bodied engagement in the climate and landscape—for Nims, being “caressed by a balmy breeze” is the essence of Florida as a place to live. While Nims was inspired in his designs by the work of Mies van der Rohe, his contemporary and fellow Miami architect Alfred Browning Parker was recognized as a follower of Frank Lloyd Wright. Yet, the architects both used locally available materials and methods of construction, and employed natural ventilation and shading to allow the inhabitants to engage the climate and landscape of southwest Florida, and to be “caressed by the balmy breezes.” Exemplary of this are the parallels between Nims’ Adler Residence in Miami Beach and Parker’s own residence in Coconut Grove, both of 1952. During the time in which these two houses were under construction, Nims and Parker shared a patented system of concrete formwork and reinforcing, passing the concrete formwork and reinforcing back and forth between construction sites.
The differences in Nims’ Mies-ian formal treatment and Parker’s Wright-ian formal treatment were far less important than their shared responses to a common place, landscape and climate—and their shared moment in what Kenneth Frampton calls the “tectonic culture” of architecture. Attending to the sharing of materiality and tectonic principles, and the manner in which this enhances architecture’s engagement of the environment, allows us to shift the evaluative focus from the formal and stylistic to the constructive, material, spatial and environmental—and their synthesis in the experience of place. It is precisely in its being constructed that the tradition of modernism in Florida has exhibited one of the attributes of the regionalism of liberation; “To express this regionalism architecturally it is necessary that there be building—preferably a lot of building—at one time. Only so can the expression be sufficiently general, sufficiently varied, sufficiently forceful to capture people’s imaginations.”
Paul Rudolph was arguably the most accomplished Florida modern architect at the mid-20th century, this due in no small part to his adept adaptation to the tropical context of Florida of the attributes common to the construction and spatial vocabularies of three figures usually seen as mutually exclusive—Wright, Mies and Le Corbusier. Rudolph’s Finney Guest House, proposed for Siesta Key in 1947 comprises a series of walls, bridges and dredged inlets and filled berms that allowed the house to be fully integrated with the site, acting to join remote bodies of land and water, while remaining delicately suspended above the landscape. Rudolph’s Burkhardt House on Casey Key of 1956-7 is a masterful reinterpretation of Wright’s domestic work, its wood framed glass exterior walls, concrete block interior walls, and extensive flat roof overhangs all around creating an atmosphere quite close to Wright’s Carlson House in Phoenix of 1950, especially in the markedly Japanese character of its post- and-beam wood frame. The Leavengood House in St. Petersburg and Walker House project, both of 1951, exemplify Rudolph’s transformation of Mies’ formal language to the Florida landscape—a full five years before Mies’ canonical Farnsworth House was completed. The single-story rectangular structures are elevated one floor off the ground, and the thin, shell- like sectional enclosure of the houses are formed by the roof and floor planes folding up on the narrow ends to provide privacy from the adjacent neighbors while maintaining maximum openness to ocean views and prevailing breezes on the long sides.
The adaptation of Mies’s designs for single-story courtyard houses, which he himself never realized, by Florida modern architects, is exemplified by Rudolph’s remarkable design for the Revere Quality Houses in Siesta Key of 1948, six houses each with a different plan that are linked and related through the private interior and shared exterior courtyards they form within the bounded rectangular site. The contrast between Rudolph’s original plan (of which only one house was realized) and the current typical suburban condition makes clear the opportunity for an entirely different way of inhabiting the landscape that Rudolph’s plan offered, one where all the site is made into a defined, interior court space, rather than left as the open ground surrounding the object house.
In the late-1950s and 1960s works of a number of Florida architects, the influence of Mies may be perceived to have decreased, and the influence of Le Corbusier to have increased. The earlier quality of attenuated lightness, realized in wood and steel construction, was slowly replaced by a heavier, more monumental character, constructed in reinforced concrete and masonry, which also served to connect these later works to the contemporary designs of Louis Kahn. Rudolph’s Deering Residence on Casey Key of 1958, with its L-shaped plan wrapping around a double-height screened porch facing the ocean, its regular rhythm of vertical concrete piers, its massive parallel concrete block walls, and its multi-level living room stepping down towards the beach, exemplifies this change in character. Rudolph’s Milam House in Ponte Vedra of 1961 is a critically important project in this transitional development. Here Le Corbusier’s concept of the deeply sculpted sunscreen was employed by Rudolph to generate a remarkably spatially and formally resolved design, the monumental and plastically powerful east and west-facing facades forming outer layers of interlocking spatial units that were drawn back through the interior to organize the plan and section. This exceptional house was built almost entirely of concrete blocks, with cast-in-place concrete edge beams and floor slabs.
Robert Ernest did his graduate work in 1958 at Yale University, where he was in the studio of Louis Kahn and met the new dean, Paul Rudolph, who hired him to supervise the construction of the Milam House. Ernest opened his own practice in Jacksonville in 1960, going on to realize three projects before dying of cancer in 1962 at age 29. Robert Ernest’s own residence and studio, built in Atlantic Beach in 1961, employed Le Corbusier’s famous (unrealized) Carthage Villa section, two interlocking C-shapes that allow all three levels of the house to be spatially and acoustically interconnected. The living and dining room, centrally located in both plan and section, overlooks the double-height studio below and is joined to the upper floor bedrooms by the double-height oceanside screened porch. The cruciform plan places the stairs on one side and the kitchen and baths on the other, allowing views both east and west, as well as through ventilation, for all the rooms. The house is both modest and monumental. The Jacksonville architect William Morgan is unique among Florida architects in that, parallel to his active fifty-year architectural practice, he maintained a “second career” publishing his documentation of the work of the ancient mound building cultures that inhabited the American continent before it received that name, with particular emphasis on sites in Florida. Morgan’s Rawls House in Jacksonville of 1965 and his Williamson House in Ponte Vedra of 1966 both have a shell-like structure composed of a single-story horizontal cantilevered volume set parallel to the beach, housing the primary rooms of the house, which is elevated above the dunes by masonry pier-rooms. The solid end walls to north and south provide privacy, while the long east and west facades are completely opened with full-height glazing, allowing ocean and land views as well as through-ventilation. Morgan’s remarkable Goodloe House in Ponte Vedra of 1965 comprises a two-story structure lifted one floor above the ground, with two sets of four rectangular volumes that are rotated in opposite directions and clustered to compose a spiraling, shell-like form with projecting rooms and recessed terraces opening to admit light and air from every direction.
Which brings us to the architect Gene Leedy, an original member of the “Sarasota School” (the name of which he coined in 1981), whose work has particular meaning for Max Strang. A student of Parker’s while at the University of Florida, Leedy worked for Rudolph in Sarasota, after which he opened his own office in Winter Haven, a central Florida community, in 1955, where he continues to practice today. The spatially engaged way of inhabiting the Florida landscape that had first been proposed in Rudolph’s 1948 Revere House may be said to have been realized in the series of courtyard houses designed by Leedy for a developer in Winter Park in 1956, and which includes his own residence. Concrete block walls run the perimeter of each site, with the single-story house itself taking up less than one-half of the area, its wood-framed roof and wood-slat ceiling set on the top of the wall, with full-height glass walls and doors running across the width of the entire house. The concrete block walls provide privacy from the neighboring courtyard houses and street, yet the interior spaces of the house are entirely open to garden courtyards on all sides.
The majority of Leedy’s works, including the First National Bank in Cape Canaveral of 1963 and Dorman Residence in Winter Haven of 1963, exhibit his characteristic deployment of precast concrete T-section beams to construct floor and roof slabs that clearly present their structural forms in the ceilings of the interior spaces, and the robustly interwoven and cantilevered exposed structural elements strongly connect the interior and exterior spaces. The dramatically cantilevered roofs of Leedy’s buildings, which provide a strong sense of shelter for their inhabitants, shade the glass walls, and form deep habitable zones along the exterior, are directly related to the similar ways in which Wright’s buildings integrate the interior spaces and exterior environment. Leedy’s own architectural office in Winter Haven and the exceptional Solomon House in Sarasota of 1970 (built for the painter, Syd Solomon), while engaging the horizontal earth line that Wright considered so important to architecture, also engage the vertical, their spaces expanding upwards and their roofs soaring outwards to frame the space of inhabitation between the earth and the broad endless arc of the Florida sky.
The Strang Residence in Winter Haven of 1966, the house in which Max Strang grew up, is one of Leedy’s masterpieces of domestic architecture. Sited on a lakeshore, the house draws the slope of the landscape into its center, where two primary rectangular volumes, and the bridges that connect them at their ends, form a courtyard terraced into the ground yet open to the lake. The shell-like structure is open to both the lakeside in front and the courtyard within, allowing light and breezes to pass from outside to inside to outside again, while the solid side walls protect the privacy of the inhabitants. The floors of the living room, dining room and playroom extend onto broad terraces cantilevered towards the lake and into the courtyard, and the matching roof cantilevers effectively double the width of the occupiable space of the house—half outside and half inside. The generosity of space and natural light, the sense of porosity and openness within a rigorously structured shell, and the integration of
interior life and exterior environment together characterize the experience of this remarkable house.
In growing up in a house designed by Gene Leedy, and in working for Leedy after graduating from school, Max Strang has to a large degree been formed by the tradition of modern architecture in Florida, and his own work, as documented in this book, is a transformation and renewal of the tradition of tropical modernism. Rather than describe Strang’s individual projects, it is perhaps better to suggest that readers keep the general characteristics, qualities and disciplinary principles that his works share with both the tradition of Florida modernism and the regionalism of liberation, as they have been outlined in this essay, in mind as they review the buildings presented in this book.
In conclusion, we return to “this new but ancient way,” as Frank Lloyd Wright described the best modern architecture in Florida—a way whose roots originate in Wright’s own architecture. Beginning with the relation between the human habitation and the natural environment, so critical to making architecture that is appropriate to Florida, Wright developed an architecture that provides its inhabitants both prospect—views out to the surrounding landscape, as well as the entry of breezes, and refuge—shelter within the shadows formed by the extension of roof overhangs, both of which are necessary to generate a sense of comfort and repose. Emphasizing the importance of the roof overhang and its comforting shadow, Wright argued that the sense of shelter was fundamental to architecture; “An idea (probably rooted deep in instinct) that shelter should be the essential look of any dwelling, put the low spreading roof...with generously projecting eaves, over the whole. I began to see a building primarily not as a cave but as broad shelter in the open, related to vista; vista without and vista within.”
Wright often defined architecture as a combination of “cave and tent,” in which the massive cave-like walls both anchor the house and elevate the floor above the ground, and the expansive tent-like roof canopy hovers overhead, with the space of inhabitation formed in between. Wright believed that the horizontal line was that of human dwelling; “I see this extended horizontal line as the true earth-line of human life, indicative of freedom... The broad expanded plane is the horizontal plane infinitely extended. In that lies such freedom for man on this earth as he may call his own.” The experience of dwelling in the flat Florida landscape, hovering above the uncertain, water-saturated, porous, shifting ground and sheltered between the levitating planes of floor and ceiling, is that of being anchored to the horizon. The horizon is not fixed in experience, but as Wright’s contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote; “People forget that the eye makes the horizon.” In experience we carry the horizon line with us wherever we go, resulting in the “shifting horizon line” described by Paul Klee.
The work of the best Florida modern architects, including the buildings of Max Strang, may be characterized as shaping shelter within shell-like forms, and here the shell should be understood as a fusion of Wright’s reciprocal pairing of the cave and the tent, which he had earlier used to define architecture. The shell-like modern buildings of Florida, with their cantilevered roof and floor planes, share the common characteristics of placing their inhabitants on the horizon line; situating them in their place and time; enfolding and nestling them within the unique qualities of their sites; unfolding outwards and connecting them to the extended horizontal landscape; shading them from the sunshine while remaining open to the embrace of the tropical climate; and allowing them to be “caressed by the balmy breezes.” In the inextricable intertwining of the tropical environment of Florida and the experience of architecture’s inhabitants, the ideal of shelter is embodied in the shell. In this, as in so many things, Wright was there before us, writing in 1932; “The shell as human habitation. Why not? Another phase of architecture is organic... The sense of interior space coming through, the openings all woven together as integral features of the shell.”
