Campus by Wright failing test of time

Campus by Wright failing test of time
Architect designed 12 buildings at Florida college, but they've been designated as 'endangered'

By Stevenson Swanson
Tribune national correspondent
Published July 9, 2007


LAKELAND, Fla. -- In the hallway of a science building at Florida Southern College here, silvery ventilation ducts sprout from the floor, rise some 7 feet, take an abrupt 90-degree turn and disappear into the walls of classrooms.

It seems a safe bet that Frank Lloyd Wright didn't design them that way.

Last month, when the World Monuments Fund released its new watch list of the world's most endangered cultural sites, one of the biggest surprises on the list was Wright's Florida Southern campus.

It was a surprise on two counts.

In the decades since his death in 1959, Wright's stature as America's greatest architect has become almost universally accepted. How could a Wright project be in such danger that it would merit inclusion on one of the most important lists of imperiled sites?

But the very existence of the Wright campus was also startling. Wright designed a college campus? In Florida?

Although the project is certainly known to Wright scholars and dedicated Wright buffs, it has been vastly overshadowed by such landmarks as his home and studio in Oak Park, Ill., and Fallingwater, a house built over a stream in western Pennsylvania.

Yet Florida Southern boasts the largest single-site collection of the master architect's buildings -- 12 structures, spanning the important later decades of his life that produced Fallingwater and New York's Guggenheim Museum.

Far from being disturbed by the monuments fund listing, college officials are thrilled Florida Southern was included. They are in the midst of the first comprehensive study of the condition of the Wright buildings, which will help guide preservation efforts. They believe that recognition by the fund will help the fundraising efforts of the college, which has 1,750 students.

"We are a small college with a small treasury and a small endowment, so if we have to raise $40 million or $50 million, that's a major undertaking," said President Anne Kerr in an interview in the Wright-designed administration building.

Wright's 21-year involvement with the United Methodist college began in 1938, when then-President Ludd Spivey wired Wright to ask him to design a "great education temple" on 100 acres in this Central Florida city about 30 miles east of Tampa.

Wright designed 18 buildings, of which 12 were built, and a network of covered walkways through the site's orange trees. The walkways, with thick columns that suggest tree trunks, link the buildings and protect students from Florida's hot sun and frequent afternoon showers.

The most famous building is the Annie Pfeiffer Chapel, with a horizontal, trellis-like spire that campus wags call "God's bicycle rack." The chapel, like all the Wright buildings on campus, was built with concrete blocks made with local sand and poured into custom-built molds to create a variety of textile-like patterns.

For the chapel alone, Wright designed 46 different molds, according to Mark Tlachac, one of several docents who give tours to about 25,000 visitors a year.

As befits a building dedicated to spiritual matters, the chapel reaches skyward, but Wright wanted the other campus buildings to be low to the ground. Each one would appear to emerge from the Earth, like a "child of the sun," he said.



'Uniquely American campus'

Wright listed Florida Southern as one of the important projects he thought should be included in a 1950s TV program devoted to his work. Always the loudest tooter of his own horn, he felt that he had designed "the first uniquely American campus," brushing off Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia campus.

"Mr. Wright invested a lot in this project," said Jim Rogers, a Florida Southern art history professor and Wright scholar, who noted that the campus was the only multibuilding project of Wright's ever to be built. "He gave far more to it than anyone would have as a business matter. It was an investment in an ideal."

With money short, Spivey and Wright recruited the college's students to do much of the early construction. That led to wide variations in quality, according to Jeffrey Baker, an Albany, N.Y., preservation architect who is preparing a master plan of the campus to document Wright's original intentions and how they were altered over the decades.

"These textile blocks were an idea he developed in California and never gave up, despite questions about how effective they were," said Baker, whose study is being funded with a $195,000 grant from the Getty Foundation.

At Florida Southern, the blocks turned out to be porous, allowing moisture to penetrate and corrode the reinforcing bars. Many of the blocks have to be replaced. Baker pointed out a wall made of the patterned blocks that had been broken open, revealing reinforcing bars that have rusted to dust in places.

"You can pull some of these blocks out with your hands," he said, picking at tiny pieces of corroded iron.

After Wright's death, the college and Wright's successors at Taliesin, the combination school-architecture firm that carried on his legacy, had a bitter falling-out over money. Taliesin's leaders claimed the college owed them nearly $200,000 for work that Wright and his apprentices had done.

Taliesin stopped working for the college, and neither Taliesin nor the college did much to promote the fact that Wright had designed the campus.

To make matters worse, one of Wright's students, Nils Schweitzer, set up his own firm and designed buildings for the college, but he adopted a stripped-down modern style that was radically different from Wright's.

And college administrators adapted Wright's buildings to modern times by adding air conditioning and safety features as cheaply as possible.

"You've got the financial breakup, you've got the apprentice turning on the master, you've got the wrong buildings going up," Rogers said. "It's lucky the campus survived."

Kerr said that when she became president three years ago, she quickly realized she had to learn a new skill -- that of being an architectural conservator. Of immediate concern was the state of the covered walkways, which Wright called "esplanades."

With the passage of the decades, some of the once-straight cantilevered structures now dip menacingly toward the ground. Kerr said her nightmare was that a walkway would collapse on a student.

Major fundraising ahead

The 1.5 miles of esplanades are being repaired with funds from a $1.6 million state grant. And a mix of private and public funds is paying for the $700,000 restoration of Wright's Water Dome, a large fountain in the center of the campus.

But the serious fundraising lies ahead, after Baker, the preservation architect, completes the master plan this year. That will help the college put a firmer price tag on the restoration work, while the monuments fund listing is expected to help the college argue that the work is vital to preserving a priceless piece of Wright's legacy.

"In my heart of hearts, I really do believe we have one of the architectural treasures of the planet," said Rogers, the art historian. "If we can preserve this architectural heritage and pass it on to the next generation in better shape than we found it, we will have done something of real value."

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