Frank Lloyd Wright's Florida Experiment

Near the southern edge of downtown, on a campus that rolls gently toward Lake Hollingsworth, stands the largest single collection of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture anywhere in the world. Twelve original structures, a thirteenth added later, all built between nineteen thirty-eight and nineteen fifty-eight at Florida Southern College. Wright called it Child of the Sun, and the name tells you everything about how he approached the subtropical setting.

The story begins in January nineteen thirty-eight, when college president Ludd Spivey sent Wright a telegram asking if he would design a campus unlike any other, a great education temple in Florida. Wright accepted. He visited the campus in May of that year, stood on a scrubby hillside, and said he could envision buildings that would grow out of the ground and into the light. He sketched a master plan of eighteen buildings connected by an esplanade system that would shelter students from rain and sun without walls.

There was one problem. The college had almost no money. Spivey's solution was as practical as it was audacious. Students would help build Wright's designs as part of their education. They mixed concrete, formed textile block molds, and laid courses of the tan-colored building blocks that Wright had perfected a decade earlier in California. When World War Two drained the campus of male students, women took over the construction work. The buildings rose slowly, semester by semester, shaped in part by the hands of the people who would study in them.

Annie Pfeiffer Chapel was the first to open, in nineteen forty-one. Its steeple is not a traditional cross but an abstract tower of perforated concrete, letting filtered light play across the interior. The Esplanades covering the campus walkways are among the most photographed structures, low-slung concrete pergolas that Wright insisted must never be straightened. Every campus building sits on a hexagonal grid, the organic geometry Wright believed matched human movement better than rigid right angles.

Florida Southern was designated a National Historic Landmark in twenty twelve, one of only a handful of entire campuses to receive that distinction. If you want to understand how Wright adapted his prairie-school vision to a Florida orange grove, this is the only place on earth to do it.