Emile E. Watson Administration Building, Florida Southern College (Chronicle photograph by Lawrence Biemiller) Jeffrey Baker is an architect who specializes in preservation, so it is no surprise that he gets excited about showing off the Annie Pfeiffer Chapel at Florida Southern College, which has hired him to create a preservation plan. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the high-sided, hexagonal chapel has a tower that Mr. Baker says is “structurally incredibly complex, almost like origami in concrete.”
But it is a surprise when he says the chapel is in good shape. The fist-size holes in its crumbling exterior walls could easily make you think otherwise.
It turns out that what Mr. Baker means by “good shape” is that $2-million “would go a long way” toward fixing the walls, undoing some ill-advised changes made over the years, and putting in a fully functional climate-control system. As preservation price tags go, $2-million is nothing; Yale University just spent $44-million on a 1953 Louis Kahn art museum.
The Annie Pfeiffer Chapel was dedicated in 1941, the same year in which three other Wright buildings opened at Florida Southern. Although it was neither well known nor well off, the college had an ambitious president, Ludd M. Spivey, and thanks to him it ended up with a dozen structures designed by Wright, easily the most famous and inventive architect in American history. Florida Southern has the only college campus planned by Wright, who died in 1959, as well as the largest single collection of Wright buildings anywhere — many of them built partly by students working in return for tuition and board.
But for a liberal-arts college of about 1,900 students with a modest endowment, that’s a mixed blessing. Striking and historically important as they are, the Wright buildings present a long list of challenges: Some have structural problems that can be traced to Wright’s having relied on new and untested designs. Many are too small for the college’s current needs, and all have been hard to modernize affordably. Bundles of data cables snake indecorously through holes drilled in the walls of Wright’s compact seminar building, for instance, while the ventilation system added a few years ago to his science building disfigures its roof line so badly that you dare not imagine what the famously temperamental architect would have to say about it.
And while Wright’s buildings attract more than 20,000 tourists every year, they hold no particular appeal for today’s high-school seniors. Florida Southern’s glossy 16-page viewbook has one two-inch-tall photograph that shows students talking in a Wright-designed walkway, but that’s it. The small type inside the back cover mentions the Wright structures at the end of a list of campus highlights that focuses on features like the lakeside walking trail, the wellness center, the Olympic-size pool, and the tennis courts.
Nonetheless, the college received $195,000 from the Getty Foundation’s Campus Heritage Grant program to create a preservation plan for the Wright buildings, and Mr. Baker has been hard at work on the details of repairs and renovations. Anne B. Kerr, who has been Florida Southern’s president for three years, says that while her first responsibility is to Florida Southern’s students, faculty members, and educational mission, the college appreciates its role as conservator. “It seems to me to be very doable to raise money for Frank Lloyd Wright renovations,” she says, adding that “the deterioration is significant enough that if we don’t do something now,” at least some of the buildings will be in serious trouble. Indeed, last week the World Monuments Fund included the college’s Wright buildings on its 2008 Watch List of 100 Most Endangered Sites.
Two preservation projects are already under way here. One, paid for with a special $1.6-million state appropriation, is the repair of a mile-and-a-half-long network of covered walkways, known as esplanades, that connect the Wright buildings. The walkways’ roofs cantilever out from concrete posts that Wright designed to recall the orange trees that previously grew in a grove on the site — the posts’ bases represent the trees’ trunks, spreading shapes stand in for the branches, and precise incisions in the concrete call to mind the leaves.
The grid on which the Wright buildings are arranged was also inspired by the grove, in which trees were placed 18 feet apart. Wright divided and subdivided that 18-foot distance to come up with other important dimensions for campus structures, like the three-foot length and nine-inch height of the concrete blocks used in every building. The grid and the posts were part of Wright’s search for what he referred to as “a real Florida form” that would set a new standard for architecture in the state.
But Wright’s esplanade design did not include expansion joints, and that proved to be a problem. The esplanades, Mr. Baker says, have created their own joints by cracking where they needed to, and at least one post failed altogether and had to be replaced. Luckily, the college has kept all of Wright’s concrete molds. “We have rooms filled with molds,” he says.
The other current project is the restoration of Wright’s “water dome.” It is a 90-foot-diameter pool over which 74 jets were intended to make a dome of water 40 to 50 feet high. Although the pumps never created enough pressure to achieve the effect Wright sought, Mr. Baker says Wright “saw it as the spiritual center or heartbeat of the campus — it was the focal point of the entire design.” The original pool has been excavated and is being readied for new high-pressure jets.
Mr. Baker is also planning repairs for the Annie Pfieffer Chapel and several of Wright’s other buildings here. Like many Wright structures, the chapel has a number of innovative elements. The wall blocks, for instance, have openings for colored glass shapes meant to pierce the wall with light. But now the blocks, made on the campus by Florida Southern students, are causing trouble. Because Wright wanted each block to lie flat on the block beneath it, with no mortar separating the two, iron rods were embedded in the walls to hold the blocks in place. Unfortunately the process he specified for grouting around the iron rods didn’t really work, so when water got into the unmortared joints, the rods rusted and the blocks began cracking.
“There are two kinds of blocks — blocks that have failed, and blocks that will fail,” says Mr. Baker. The blocks “are a real challenge” but not an insurmountable one, thanks to all those molds and to stainless-steel rods and better grouting. Mr. Baker is also eager to remove replacement windows behind the balconies and return to Wright’s original French-door design.
On the other hand, there are modifications that he is happy to retain — like the addition of air-conditioning. “President Spivey wrote that you couldn’t sit in the building more than 20 minutes at a time for eight months of the year,” Mr. Baker says.
Another building in need of work opened in 1945 as the library. It now houses offices and, in the circular former reading room, a visitors’ center displaying concrete molds, uncomfortable-looking wooden furniture that Wright designed for the college, and other artifacts, including designs for as-yet-unbuilt Wright buildings. Unfortunately, the structure has some sagging rafters and cracking walls, which Mr. Baker estimates will cost some $3.5-million to fix.
Other Wright buildings here appear to be in better shape — a sprawling classroom building, a delightful set of administrative buildings designed on the residential scale that Wright excelled at, and the science complex. But almost every room offers some hint of the tension between making Wright’s buildings useful for 21st-century college students and preserving the architect’s sometimes-idiosyncratic vision — here, modern light fixtures Wright would have loathed; there, bold, polished ductwork that does its best to look stylish, even if it is not original.
“I hold out a lot of hope for this campus,” says Mr. Baker. “A lot of the original fabric is intact.” Indeed, the gem of the campus — the tiny William H. Danforth Chapel, which peers out from beneath some trees beside the Annie Pfeiffer Chapel — appears to be in almost perfect condition. Movable pews designed by Wright and built by students are still in use, and climbing the narrow, angled stairway to Wright’s little choir loft is unexpectedly thrilling. A single piece of stained glass is missing from the big window behind the altar. That, at least, is an easy repair.
http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Volume 53, Issue 41, Page A30
