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Lakeland, Florida
I don't mind my head when there's room to dream, feel like Paul Gauguin painting breadfruit trees in some far off place where I don't belong
After AIA Conventions in Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Miami, New Orleans, Washington, DC, Denver, Chicago, Atlanta and Philadelphia, the AIA and all of those architects come to Orlando and the 2017 AIA Convention or, more accurately, A’17. The AIA has rebranded their conventions as a “Conference on Architecture” and included that A’17 part so we know what year it is. I guess that eventually I’ll get used to it, but for now it just seems kind of goofy.
And then there’s the Orlando part. When you think of Orlando, you think of Disney and not much else. But there has to be something else to see, doesn’t there? Luckily we’re answering our own question by heading out to Lakeland and ET 112. As I’m sure you already know, for the AIA, ET means educational tour, not ejection time or enemy territory, although I guess those other abbreviations might work sometimes as well.
The full name of ET 112 is “Calatrava Raises The Roof: Florida Polytechnic University,” and it was a 2 (HSW/GBCI) credit tour of this building, which you may have seen on the right hand side of the road if you ever drove from Tampa to Orlando on I-4. The “raises the roof” part refers to a lifting brise soliel that was not quite working on the sunny day of the tour, you can see that in this first picture, where one single piece is stuck open and all the other ones remain in their closed positions.
The campus seemed interesting enough, but all I honestly cared about was the Santiago Calatrava designed Innovation, Science, and Technology Building. Programatically, it had classrooms and lab spaces on the ground floor off a perimeter arcade and a spectacular library space above on the top floor under the brise soleil lifting dome. The interior spaces were clean, white, well designed and just about as dramatic as you would expect from a Santiago Calatrava building.
The Innovation, Science, and Technology Building is (generally) surrounded by water, with the only exception being an at grade entry plaza on the I-4 side. Calatrava wrapped his building in two levels of terraces, a lakeside level and at the perimeter of the library. Wrapping both of them, he added a fixed sunscreen that, in the morning Florida heat, provided almost no real shade but did, at every turn, present itself well for yet another dramatic picture of sky and shadows.
For a last picture, a reminder not to feed the alligators.
On the tour, one of the guides told us that the water table in Florida is generally right below the ground on which you stand. If you want to create a lake, all you have to do is dig a hole and you’ll get one, And then there’s no stopping your brand new lake in getting a friendly (or, I guess, not so friendly) alligator to show up. It’s just a fact of life in Florida. So remember, don’t feed the always present alligators because a content alligator in your lake is apparently way worse than a desperately hungry one.
Of all of the tours offered at A’17 (that new branding still sounds goofy to me), there were really only two that were interesting on their own as pure architecture. One was ET 112 (the Calatrava building at Florida Polytechnic University) and the other was another college campus, also in Lakeland. ET 102: Frank Lloyd Wright's Child of the Sun: Campus at Florida Southern College took us on a tour of thirteen Frank Lloyd Wright buildings on a college campus that he designed. They might not be his best buildings, but they’re still Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and definitely worth seeing.
We’ll start our visit at the Annie Pfeiffer Chapel, the first building that Wright built on campus and probably the most interesting in terms of interior space, It also uses exterior blocks with little inset stained glass pieces to great effect, something I tried to capture in the photos but something which is a lot nicer in person.
This is a dramatic photo of the chapel taken from the outside, with the ragged edges of the concrete out of focus and framing the stair landing and the distant stained glass patterns. And while it’s great that I was able to take this dramatic photo, it’s a bigger problem that there’s a hole ion the building that allowed me to do it. Owning a Frank Lloyd Wright building (or any historic building) can not be easy, but maybe, even with all of those maintenance headaches and unexpected costs, filling in open holes to the outside should be a higher priority. Just saying.
The thirteen Wright buildings at Florida Southern College Campus (which Wright called “Child of the Sun,” possibly because it sometimes gets as hot as the sun in that part of Central Florida) are individually interesting enough and definitely Wrightian enough that there’s no mistaking who the architect was. Between most of those thirteen Wrightian buildings is a continuous concrete breezeway, helping to frame and connect those buildings and the campus into one composition.
The newest Frank Lloyd Wright building on campus is only five years old. Wright had provided plans for a Usonian House to be built on campus, and after some time, Florida Southern College decided to move ahead with building it. Usonian houses were traditionally well designed, anyone can build houses for the low, low price of $5,000, or, due to the insane amount of inflation since, about $50,000 today. Of course, materials and labor available in 1950 are a lot different in 2013, and final construction costs came in at $1.3 million dollars, just a little higher than Wright’s promised $5,000, or even the inflation adjusted $50,000.
The Usonian House is being used as a visitors center for the Child of the Sun campus, and it’s honestly quite beautiful in person. I have seen a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings from Buffalo to Mill Run to San Rafael to Bartlesville and Meji-Mura, but all of them, even the restored ones, are still 70 or 80 years old. It is such an unusual treat to see a brand new one, that it almost feels like you’ve gone back to a different, far more hopeful time.
And speaking about back to a different, far more hopeful time, back in Orlando at the Convention Center, the wonderful featured keynote speaker was Michelle Obama, pictured twice in this picture: her projected image on the upper right, her real size image on the lower left underneath the great big “7.”
As for the convention center, it’s not especially exciting architecturally, but it certainly is big. Luckily I stayed at the convention center at a Hilton Hotel, but, as I already said, the convention center is certainly big. From my hotel to the tour departure desk at the convention center was a solid, mile long walk over open air covered sky bridges, through another closer hotel and through all sorts of other parts of that big convention center. Everyday after a long day of tours, I thought about just weaseling out and paying for an Uber to save me that list mile of walking through the thick humid air and everyday I decided to just suck it up and walk on back over those open air covered sky bridges, through that closer hotel and again through all sorts of other parts of that big convention center.
