Guggenheim Museum Architecture Exhibition, Child of the Sun Frank Lloyd Wright building USA, Modern FL structure
Child of the Sun Florida Exhibition, USA
Child of the Sun, Florida Southern Colleges, United States of America
post updated June 23, 2021 ; May 5, 2009
Frank Lloyd Wright : Guggenheim Museum Exhibition
Sun Rises on Florida Southern Colleges Frank Lloyd Wright Treasures
Frank Lloyd Wrights Largest Single-site Body Of Work Included In Upcoming Guggenheim Exhibition
Annie Pfeiffer Chapel Florida Southern College
Architect Frank Lloyd Wright 1938-41
photo © Robin Hill
Child of the Sun, Florida
LAKELAND, FL – Florida Southern Colleges long-hidden treasure trove of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings the largest single-site collection of the architects work in the worldis ready for a new dawn. Known collectively as Child of the Sun, the 12 structures will be featured in the upcoming exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In the context of Frank Lloyd Wright’s other projects, the show, Frank Lloyd Wright : From Within Outward (May 15 through August 23), will feature photos and drawings of Frank Lloyd Wrights one-of-a-kind master plan. Coincidentally, an ambitious restoration effort is currently under way on Frank Lloyd Wright’s college campus.
Water Dome
Photo by Florida Southern College
The project occupied Frank Lloyd Wright for 21 years, from 1938 until his death in 1959, but it all began with a simple telegram sent by then-president Dr. Ludd Spivey to Frank Lloyd Wright in Taliesin West: Desire conference with you concerning plans for great education temple in Florida. Eager to realize his dream of masterminding an entire city, Frank Lloyd Wright designed 18 buildings for Spivey, 12 of which were built. To save money, five of the buildings were constructed by the students themselves in exchange for tuition.
Frank Lloyd Wrights centerpiece, a massive, 160-foot-diameter, 74-jet fountain called the Water Dome, was too technically advanced for its time. It was finally completed in 2007, the first Frank Lloyd Wright design to be built for an original client at the original site since 1966. The other buildings, however, including one-and-a-half miles of covered esplanades Frank Lloyd Wright designed to reference the sites original orange trees, had fallen into disrepair as modifications altered the original designs and their walls of porous local soil became cracked and waterlogged.
A $1.6-million grant from the State of Florida saved the walkways, and grants for $350,000 from the National Trust for Historic Preservations Save Americas Treasures Program and $195,000 from the Getty Foundation, as well as a spot on the National Register of Historic Places and the current World Monuments Watch List of 100 Most Endangered Sites, is helping raise awareness and restore the campus to its original splendor.
Esplanades and Watson Administration building
picture © Robin Hill
More than $5 million dollars in federal and state grants and private gifts, combined with the work of New York-based architect Jeff Baker of Mesick-Cohen-Wilson-Baker, is helping transform the campus back to Frank Lloyd Wright’s original masterpiece. To be renovated are Frank Lloyd Wrights only planetarium and theatre-in-the-round.
The latter, in the Lucius Pond Ordway Building, was one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s favorites on campus, echoing the light-filled interiors of his own Arizona school, Taliesin West. The William H. Danforth Chapel is resplendent in brilliant leaded glass windows, a Frank Lloyd Wright staple, but marred by theft and weather over the years.
Annie Pfeiffer Chapel interior
photo © Robin Hill
The highlight of the campus is the Annie Pfeiffer Chapel from 1941, the first building of the lot to be completed. Light pours into the chapel through colored glass inlays in the hand-cast, textured bricks, while a tower looking like a stack of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous bow ties rises from the roof. Baker will use Frank Lloyd Wright’s original molds to recast blocks for the face and parts of the rusting steel tower framecalled the the bicycle rack in the sky by students. Work is set to finish by 2010.
Fletcher
built 1952
picture by Florida Southern College
Architect and dean of the Yale School of Architecture Robert A.M. Stern is working on two new residence halls and a humanities classroom building for Florida Southern College. The buildings are designed to echo Frank Lloyd Wright’s trademark overhanging roofs and devoted relationship to the natural landscape.
The second residence hall will be completed this year, with the humanities building to follow in 2010. Stern, a long-time admirer of the site, which he calls the coolest architectural campus, will lecture on Florida Southern’s place in architectural history as one of the most important examples of Frank Lloyd Wrights work at a dinner to be held by the College at the Guggenheim Museum on June 26.
Annie Pfeiffer Chapel
image by Florida Southern College
Child of the Sun Guggenheim Museum Exhibition information received 050509
Location: Florida Southern Colleges, FL, USA
Florida Architecture
Contemporary Architecture in Florida – architectural selection below:
ReefLine, Miami Beach, FL, United States of America
Design: OMA
image by OMA
ReefLine Miami Beach
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach
Design: Foster + Partners, Architects
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach
American Architecture – Selection
Farnsworth House, Plano
Design: Mies van der Rohe Architect
Farnsworth House
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