Florida Southern College
Lakeland, Floria
Twelve structures at Florida Southern College, built between 1939 and 1958, constitute the largest single-site collection of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work in the world. Wright named the campus “Child of the Sun,” and desired to create not just architecture, but a community. The spatially complex chapel is the campus’s signature building, completed in 1941. It was mostly constructed with student labor, and the fully developed cantilevered structural system defies analysis. A 2010 Save America’s Treasures grant repaired the roof and decorative steel, and replaced the deteriorated textile blocks within the walls.
Photo: Annie Pfeiffer Chapel, Florida Southern College
– Mary Ann Sullivan
