Frank Lloyd Wright’s Florida Southern College by Dale Allen Gyure (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Dale Allen Gyure. Frank Lloyd Wright's Florida Southern College. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010, 272 pp., 73 black-and-white illustrations, 14 color plates, notes, cloth, $39.95, ISBN 978-0813035239. In Frank Lloyd Wright's Florida Southern College, Dale Allen Gyure shares the fascinating story of a small college in the American South. What makes this story relevant is the longtime relationship of the college with a single architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who shaped the architectural evolution of the campus for two decades . Gyure's book delves into the dynamic between Wright and Florida Southern College president Ludd M. Spivey that led to the creation of this architectural landmark. While Wright has gained a cult following with the litany of publications on his work, his extraordinary designs at Florida Southern have remained unknown outside academic circles. Written for a mainstream audience but with scholarly documentation ample enough to please academics, Gyure corrects this deficiency while providing a new chapter to the ARRIS 88 § VoLUME 22 '~ 2011 ever-growing encyclopedic biography of Frank Lloyd Wright-America's original "starchitect." Gyure begins by telling the history of Florida Southern College, which is similar to those of the countless small private, religious universities that dot the American landscape. Founded in 1886 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, the tiny university struggled for decades to find financial stability, a permanent home, and sustained leadership. With the hiring of Spivey in 1925, the college found a visionary leader who worked tirelessly to enable it to survive the Great Depression and build a modern campus unlike any other. An Alabama native, Spivey was an ordained Methodist minister who held advanced degrees from Vanderbilt University and the University of Chicago. Prior to Spivey's arrival at Florida Southern, the university had acquired a seventy-eight-acre site for a permanent campus in Lakeland, a small town halfway between Orlando and Tampa. In 1921, the college hired Orlando architect Frederick H. Trimble to create a master plan. Trimble's plan was loosely modeled on the University of Virginia with a central lawn flanked by academic buildings overlooking the lake. When Spivey arrived in 1925, only two of Trimble's Spanish Colonial Revival-style buildings had been completed. Over the next decade, Spivey worked indefatigably to grow the university's enrollment and gain financial stability , which led to its accreditation in 1935. In 1938, Spivey shelved Trimble's traditional campus plan for something radically different. As described by Gyure, Spivey's strategic plan for Florida Southern centered on marketing the university to an international network of wealthy donors who would fund the construction of a modern campus. Spivey realized he would need to hire a world-class architect to design a campus that would appeal to the fashionable tastes of this aristocratic crowd (p. 29). Perhaps no architect was better known than Frank Lloyd Wright in 1938, as that was the year that Wright was featured on the cover of TIME magazine and in Life, the New Yorker, and Architectural Forum (p. 26). Wright was exactly the high-profile, celebrity architect that Spivey sought. In lobbying the local community, Spivey argued that a distinctive and avant-garde campus would be a tourist attraction that enhanced Florida's booming economy. Spivey's relentless campaign was successful; he soon entered into a lifelong relationship with Wright that resulted in the reshaping of the Florida Southern campus. Wright fashioned a regionally specific architectural style, which he called the "Florida form," that used local building materials, such as coquina stone, and landscape elements, such as citrus trees. In order to create an organic sense of movement, Wright employed "reflex angles" (p. 42) that followed the site's topography of diagonals, instead of a grid. He designed distinctive , individualized buildings with common design motifs, such as cantilevered roofs, and skylights connected by covered walkways called esplanades. Wright envisioned a campus for Florida Southern where "Every building is out of the ground into the light-a child of the sun" (p. 30). Pfeiffer Chapel was the first and most significant building constructed; it served as the spiritual centerpiece of the campus. While subsequent buildings hugged the ground at human scale...