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Following the lead of Palm Springs, California, Sarasota will celebrate its architectural legacy Thursday through Sunday with the inaugural Sarasota MOD Weekend.
The event will feature seminars, tours, dinners and parties that focus on the “Sarasota School” of midcentury modern architecture that brought the region significant recognition in the post-World War II period.
The Sarasota Architectural Foundation, which is presenting the event, has gleaned various lessons from the highly successful Palm Springs Modernism Week.
“They had excellent advice from the folks in California,” said Virginia Haley, president of Visit Sarasota County, the county’s tourism agency, and a Sarasota MOD Weekend sponsor.
Paul Rudolph’s Walker Guest House on Sanibel Island was built in 1953 with counterweighted panels that can be raised or lowered depending on sunlight and weather conditions. The Sarasota Architectural Foundation is raising money to build a copy of the house as an educational exhibit on the grounds of the Ringling Museum, near the Mable Ringling Rose Garden
In February 2015, Palm Springs is scheduled to hold its 10th Modernism Week, and it has expanded to 10 days of festivities.
One bit of advice the foundation embraced was to keep its inaugural event modest.
“There needs to be a focus on the quality of the event,” said Dan Snyder, a foundation leader. “We are talking about the brand Sarasota, so everything we do here should reinforce that brand. We are trying to reflect that by doing a quality event, and being relatively modest in our goals this year.”
MOD Weekend is slated to begin with a reception and dinner Thursday night, followed by full days of presentations and tours on Friday and Saturday. Sunday’s events will be limited to three tours (see events calendar on page 8-9A).
Haley expects the event will bring positive attention to the region.
“By this time next year, you are going to see an impact,” Haley said. “It is going to build. The local organizers of MOD were very smart by not being overly ambitious, and letting it grow.
“We are excited because we have a group of great journalists coming to town. We will make sure they get to the events, but also we want them to see everything about the destination. They may not write traditional tourism stories, but they will be unbelievable stories about Sarasota County, and that’s what we want. We’ll see a year-long impact.”
Carl Abbott, the youngest of the “Sarasota School” architects and the event’s honorary chairman, says MOD Weekend will “let the state and the rest of the country know that Sarasota is a very important center for architecture.
Tenets of the "Sarasota school of architecture"
“Hopefully we will have more good modern buildings here,” said Abbott, now 78. “That is the goal of all of this. It is not just to glorify what we’ve got, but it is to open the door of awareness for more.”
MOD Weekend sprang from an idea by Marty Hylton, a University of Florida assistant professor of interior design and historic preservation and a historian of midcentury modernism.
In spring 2013, a group called DOCOMOMO, for Documentation and Conservation of the Modern Movement, held its national convention in Sarasota. Hylton suggested that Sidney Williams, a Modernism Week advisory board member in Palm Springs, come to Sarasota to discuss the benefits of the event in her community. Afterward, a workshop was held to consider holding a similar program here.
“At that point, we were still very much involved in the high school (the renovation of Sarasota High’s Building 4, by Paul Rudolph), so we were focused on that,” Snyder said. “But Marty really wanted to do this and we voted to support it. There was a lot of interest at the workshop.”
Sarasota MOD Weekend is going to be part of a national “tour day” promoted by DOCOMOMO, said foundation president Janet Minker. The 2014 event includes roughly 50 tours in 37 cities across the country. Tour Day is perhaps the nation’s largest event that promotes midcentury modern architecture.
Like Abbott, Snyder believes architectural festivals “have to be more than just tourism. We see it as an awareness thing. When we were working on the high school, awareness in the community was very low. It is very difficult to get people to support your preservation programs if there is no appreciation for them.
“We need to build up that bank of awareness so the next time something comes up, we have that awareness to support us,” Snyder said, referring to a potential demolition of an important midcentury building.
“Also, we want to show how the principles of the Sarasota School movement still are very applicable today and could help improve our built environment.”
Minker said she’s excited about the potential for the MOD events.
“I think will become its own force,” with other organizations presenting related events, Minker said.
Haley agreed, saying one of the lessons from Palm Springs’ success is that “you don’t have to own every aspect of the event. You have other partners in the community that add on additional events, and you let that build. In California, they even have fashion shows” as part of Modernism Week.
“We have the greatest concentration of modern architecture in the world,” Williams told the Herald-Tribune in 2013. “City officials were not convinced that preserving that heritage was good for business.”
But the City of Palm Springs is among the presenting sponsors now. More than 45,000 people attended the 2014 edition in February, with a direct economic impact of $22 million.
Haley said the event here will benefit by “growing into Ringling International Arts Festival.”
MOD Weekend also is expected to add to Sarasota’s appeal to educational tourists. People already come here throughout the year to see the architecture, as they do in Palm Springs; New Canaan, Connecticut; Columbus, Indiana; and Oak Park, Illinois.
“Word of mouth and reputation-building,” Haley said. “If you are seen as a community with unique and significant architecture, it helps you to stand out from your competition.”
