Wright's Stuff

Florida Trend, Oct 2007 by Keller, Amy

In a hot, dusty maintenance yard at Florida Southern College, Ken Uracius and two apprentices are pounding sand. Uracius, a New England mason who specializes in historic preservation, watches as his interns pack a grainy concrete mixture into a wooden frame and hammer it down hard with a pneumatic tool. Then they clamp another piece of wood tightly across the top and lift the wooden box onto a pallet. Gingerly, they remove the frame to reveal an architectural casting that looks like a square sand castle - and for the moment is just as fragile.

Over the next 24 hours, if Uracius' workers have gotten the mixture right, the casting will suck moisture out of the humid Florida air and harden. In the process, the delicate sand structure will transform into an exact replica of the building blocks that Frank Lloyd Wright created in building 12 structures on Florida Southern's Lakeland campus between 1939 and 1958. This particular block will replace a crumbling piece of one of the Seminars, one-story combination classroom and office buildings completed in 1941.

Wright left the small private liberal arts college with the largest single-site collection of his structures in the world. But the iconic American architect's unusual engineering and experimental materials like textile blocks - precast concrete blocks with hollow edges that create cavities for steel reinforcing rods - haven't fared well in Florida's climate. Six decades later, much of his legacy is in poor condition. Squirrels zip in and out of buildings through crumbling textile block walls. Moisture seeping in through the porous surfaces has rusted the rebar. Workers recently had to repair sections of the Esplanades - a series of low-hanging, covered walkways - that had tilted precariously, unbalanced by the gradual shifting of the ground.

"In Florida, there's no way it could have stood the test of time, but during his era there was no research for him to know that it wouldn't," says Anne Kerr, Florida Southern's president since 2004.

Restoring Wright's handiwork will cost about $50 million. Kerr has to raise that money and manage the process so that it doesn't end with the college owning a collection of valuable but impractical museum pieces. "At the end of the day," she says, "they have to be workable for our students and faculty."

Modernity

Wright had already made a name for himself by 1938, when he received a telegram from then-FSC President Ludd Spivey. Undaunted by Wright's reputation, Spivey fearlessly asked the architect to consider building a "great education temple" on 100 acres of orange groves in Florida. Wright, legendary for both his ego and his talent, wasn't put off by Spivey's audacity, sensing a kindred spirit in the charismatic, ambitious college president with grandiose plans. The architect accepted the challenge to build the "first uniquely American campus." "I think he wanted to leave behind a legacy for himself," says James Rogers, chairman of Florida Southern's department of art and art history.

Wright, then 70, visited Lakeland. For $13,000, he drew up plans for 18 structures, including a chapel, library, classrooms and a planetarium. As a focal point for the campus, Wright envisioned a giant circular pool ringed with jets that would spray water 75 feet into the air, forming a hemispherical dome of water nearly 160 feet in diameter. The "Water Dome" would symbolize the fountain of knowledge, the journey of the students attending Florida Southern. Meanwhile, to shield students from the oppressive sun and frequent summer rains, he connected his buildings with a mile and a half of covered walkways, which were cantilevered and supported by columns meant to represent abstract orange trees.

A leader in organic architecture - a design philosophy that involves blending structures into their surroundings and using natural materials whenever possible - Wright designed buildings of a modest height. The only tall structure on campus is the Annie Pfeiffer Chapel, a towering building that students have nicknamed the "bicycle rack in the sky" because of the intricate wrought iron work atop its skylights.

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, with money tight, Spivey enlisted students as construction workers on the buildings, offering them tuition in exchange for their labor. During World War II, female students finished the E .T. Roux Library on their own, using an elaborate system of pulleys to cart heavy loads of concrete up to the second floor. In 1958, 20 years after Wright began designing the campus, the Polk County Science Building was finished, the 12th and final Wright building to be constructed.

Steep costs

While the 12 buildings on the Florida Southern campus amount to the single largest collection of Wright's work, they may also be among his least known - making Kerr's job of rounding up funds for the renovation particularly challenging. She says she had a difficult time convincing the World Monument Fund that Frank Lloyd Wright had in fact designed the college: "You don't have a Frank Lloyd campus," Kerr says a man there told her. "What you have is somebody who's used Frank Lloyd Wright's look. They're not originals." It wasn't until she reached into a bag and hauled out Wright's original drawings for the campus buildings that the man "literally recoiled" in surprise.