The years: 1941 to 1966. The place: Sarasota, Florida. The story: a sudden burst of fresh, innovative houses by a group of Americans who caught the imagination of the international architectural community. Inflected by local climate, construction practices, regional culture, and Florida life-style, the work of the Sarasota school of architecture—founded by Ralph Twitchell and counting Paul Rudolph, Mark Hampton, Victor Lundy, and Gene Leedy among its practitioners—marks a high point in the development of regional modernism in American architecture. Although the Sarasota school wasn't a consciously organized movement, it was an important chapter in American modernism that, unlike the earlier Bay Area school and Chicago school, has received little study or published scholarly treatment. John Howey, who practices architecture in the region, provides the first solid documentation of the Sarasota group's designs and theories. He has interviewed all of the surviving architects and original clients and has included a rich archive of photographs by Ezra Stoller, Alexandra Georges, and others whose views, particularly of the houses built between 1950 and 1960, gained world-wide exposure when they were first published forty years ago. Howey first investigates the early influences on the Sarasota group, particularly of Frank Lloyd Wright in Florida. He then discusses such pivotal events as the opening of Ralph Twitchell's office in 1936 and the arrival of Paul Rudolph in 1941. Later chapters illustrate the effect of World War II on the Sarasota architects; early postwar successes of Twitchell and Rudolph; the influences of the Bauhaus and International Style; the tendency of various Sarasota architects to create their own design directions the arrival of Victor Lundy in 1954; the effect of changing economic, social, and political agendas on Sarasota's culture; and the philosophy and results of the Sarasota school.

For more information including the introduction, a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample pages and more, visit the Encyclope dia of 20th Century Architecture website. Focusing on architecture from all regions of the world, this three-volume set profiles the twentieth century's vast chronicle of architectural achievements, both within and well beyond the theoretical confines of modernism. Unlike existing works, this encyclopedia examines the complexities of rapidly changing global conditions that have dispersed modern architectural types, movements, styles, and building practices across traditional geographic and cultural boundaries.

Paul Rudolph, one of the twentieth century’s most iconoclastic architects, is best known – and most maligned – for his large “brutalist” buildings, like Yale’s Art and Architecture Building. So it will surprise many to learn that early in his career he developed a series of houses that represent the unrivaled possibilities of a modest American modernism. With their distinctive natural landscapes, local architectural precedents, and exploitation of innovative construction materials, the Florida houses, some eighty projects built between 1946 and 1961, brought modern architectural form into a gracious subtropical world of natural abundance developed to a high pitch of stylistic refinement. Paul Rudolph: The Florida Houses reveals all of Rudolph’s early residential work. With Rudolph’s personal essays and renderings, duotone photographs by Ezra Stoller and Joseph Molitor, and insightful text by Joseph King and Christopher Domin, this compelling new book conveys the lightness, timelessness, strength, materiality, and transcendency of Rudolph’s work.

This volume documents the best examples of Florida's residential architecture era, which took place between 1941 and 1966. Many homes incorporate verandas, porches, and raised floors to open out to tropical vegetation, and more importantly, cooling breezes.

Sarasota in the 1950s was a small community graced with an alluring natural beauty. What set it apart from so many Florida beachfront towns was the concentration of artists, writers, and architects who gathered there--including author MacKinley Kantor and architects Paul Rudolf and Ralph Twitchell--a unique confluence of talented and daring architects coupled with a hip crowd willing to take risks. Sarasota was a place in which innovation and experimentation were the order of the day, a place where an architect might run into the local watering hole to shout: "I just invented the sliding glass door." Such was the confluence of art and architecture that laid the groundwork for the Sarasota School of Architecture, so named after the fact by architect Gene Leedy at an American Institute of Architecture (AIA) conference in the 1980s to refer to the unique architecture of this region, an architecture that is wonderfully responsive to Sarasota's sub-tropical environment and which has achieved international importance for its beauty, intelligence, and style. Today, Sarasota's treasures are being rediscovered by lovers of innovative architecture, who are buying and restoring these prized homes; but also, unfortunately, by developers, who are recklessly knocking them down. Sarasota Modern, the first book of its kind to focus exclusively on this vibrant community, offers the reader an intimate look into the stunning houses as they are lived in today.

If you're looking for something new under the midcentury sun, Victor Lundy (born 1923) is a real find, an important yet underappreciated figure in the history of American architecture. Trained in both the Beaux Arts and Bauhaus traditions, he built an impressive practice ranging from small-scale residential and commercial buildings to expressive religious buildings and two preeminent institutional works: the US Tax Court Building in Washington, DC (now on the National Register of Historic Places), and the US Embassy in Sri Lanka. This first book on Lundy's life and career documents his early work in the Sarasota School of Architecture, his churches, and his government buildings. In addition to essays on his use of light and material, many of the architect's original drawings, paintings, and sketches—including those from his travels throughout Europe, the Middle East, India, and Mexico, now held at the Library of Congress—are reproduced here for the first time.