The House Beautiful/AIA Climate Control Project
1949-1952
The Sarasota School of Architecture was a loosely constrained movement begun by a select group of Southern architects, most namely Ralph Twitchell (considered father of the movement) and Paul Rudolph (spiritual leader). The aims of these architects were to find inspiration in and develop a indigenous west coast Florida architecture. This architecture was to maintain a respect for land and climate, an appreciation for historical success (regionalism), and to incorporate local materials and construction techniques whenever possible. Their initial aims developed by Rudolph in 1947 are perhaps obvious and commonplace today, but were intended as a means of evolving modernism into a functional, regionally applicable aesthetic. This philosophy is as follows:11
Both simple planning ideas and more complicated building technology applications were united under the umbrella of the Sarasota modern. These architects strove to find inspiration in vernacular west Floridian precedents and local indigenous architectural forms such as patios, courts, screen porches, verandas, open plans, free flowing of inner and outer spaces, and lightness of structure.12 This said, the aim was to achieve a modern architecture and as such, the architects' advanced ideas were enabled by newer technologies such as larger glass panels, the possibility of wider cantilevers (for shading), and the option of utilizing non-load bearing privacy walls with glass between wall and roof and glass casement windows framed into the fixed glass walls for ventilation.13 As new building technology was developed between the two wars, both architects and clients were interested in new applications for it.
The following statement will give you a sense from out of which this climate-sensitive architecture was coming.
'The Florida land boom of the mid-1920s attracted architects from around the country who sought to create a Florida identity loosely derived from the architecture of the Mediterranean basin. The style was borne out of the fantastical longings of developers to market the state as a remote and mysterious tropical oasis. And yet the Mediterranean Revival Style of architecture, ill adapted to Florida's moist and warm climate (thick walls, narrow roof overhangs, and small windows), was the antithesis of all that was to come with Sarasota's modern movement twenty years later. Such is the difference between an architecture that is purposefully created to fit a region and one that is reinterpreted from another time and place to provide a backdrop to an imagined land.'14
Although the temporary threat of a fuel shortage ignited by WWII was part of the motivation in developing a climate-sensitive approach to architecture, this interest in climate as a driver for design was also based in a modernist fear of historicism. The concern was that architecture would regress out of modernism after the war. By using climate to drive design, modern architecture could also be configured as functional.