Publication Date: October 31, 2010
Of all the architects who flocked to Sarasota after World War II, Jack West took perhaps the biggest chance.
While studying architecture at Yale in the late 1940s, the native of an Illinois farm town called Galesburg had read about how Ralph Twitchell and Paul Rudolph -- "my gods of the moment," he would later write -- were adapting International Style modernism to Florida's landscape and climate.
The 27-year-old Navy veteran wanted in on the action. So he and his wife, Joyce, packed their car and headed to Sarasota, unannounced.
(1/12/00)(SARASOTA HERALD-TRIBUNE STAFF PHOTO BY BARRY MCCARTHY)*Digital Image -- Architect Jack West, one of the originators of the Sarasota School of building design, with his City Hall.
The day before they arrived, Twitchell and Rudolph had fired their draftsman. As Joyce waited in their Chevrolet convertible, a graduation gift from his mother, West knocked on the door of their modest Siesta Key office. Rudolph was away in New York, but Twitchell was there and hired West on the spot for $35 a week. Then the gallant Twitchell walked to the Chevy and charmed the young Mrs. West.
"Luck, luck, luck," is how West described the beginning of his career in his autobiography, "The Lives of an Architect" (Fauve Publishing, Sarasota, 1988).
"Timing is everything," said Tim Seibert, a career-long friend of West, who died Oct. 24 at age 88. A memorial service is planned for Nov. 13 at a site to be determined.
But the timing wasn't always right for West. Around 1970, he drew up plans for a a public library in Sarasota, but it was never built. He advocated a parking garage to serve City Hall. The bus station is there now. And when he recommended a 10-story annex to City Hall for office space, the city built three floors -- and now requires space elsewhere. He drew up plans for a resort on Lido Beach that was to have Donald Trump as an owner. Never built.
West drew dozens of designs for one famous client, author MacKinlay Kantor, only to have them rejected by his wife.
"T.L.O.A.A." West repeats these initials throughout his book, which chronicles setbacks as well as triumphs. The lives of an architect.
Despite the disappointments, which are common in the profession, West endured to become an important contributor to the county's built environment over 50 years, with a portfolio that includes Sarasota City Hall (1966), the Chamber of Commerce building (1966) on Second Street (now a remodeled office building), the circular Hilton Leech Studio (1959, now a private residence) on Riverwood Avenue, and a 1972 building now occupied by Gateway Bank. He also designed public schools, including the old Tuttle Elementary (1960) and an addition to Fruitville Elementary (1957-58) and Englewood Elementary (1957-58), and houses, one of which, the Courtyard House (1964) on Bird Key, was an Arvida model and won a Homes for Better Living award.
The Nokomis Beach Pavilion, designed in 1956 by Jack West and restored by Sarasota County, under the direction of West, in 2008. The pavilion and beach on southern Casey Key are significant amenities for residents of Nokomis. Photo taken 11-21-2011 by Harold Bubil.
His first public project was the Nokomis Beach Plaza, which he designed in 1953, when he was 31. Fifty years later, the county hired him for its renovation of the plaza, and handed him a commemorative plaque at a well-attended rededication ceremony.
"I imagine that gave him great joy," said Seibert.
The same could be said for an exhibition of West's career being prepared by architect-author Joe King, who co-wrote "Paul Rudolph: The Florida Houses" (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002).
"Jack was a very talented designer, and he also cared a great deal about the City of Sarasota, about the community," said King, who said the exhibit should be ready for display in the old Chidsey Library building on Sarasota's North Trail in January.
"He felt that good quality design would contribute to the quality of life in the community. So he worked very hard throughout his career to design in the interests of the community, in all sorts of scales. At the scale of custom residences, at the scale of public housing, institutional scale like City Hall, and in the scale of city planning.
"He did a number of different master plans for the downtown area."
One of them was an ambitious 1960 concept intended to boost the fortunes of downtown after merchants started fleeing for the new shopping centers. It had highrises along the bayfront and an elevated pedestrian plaza that would connect thecity to the water after the routing of the Tamiami Trail along the shoreline two years earlier. It included a dome for shopping that looked much like the big-league baseball stadiums built 10 years later in Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. West called it "Main Street Revisited." A city commissioner called it "too extravagant." Again, it was never built. This is where West would insert: T.L.O.A.A.
But the architect did not let his big-picture visions obscure his concern for detail.
"He was very interested both in craft, but also in high-quality design and construction," said King. "If you look at his interest in the assemblies and the details, he was really very focused on getting it right, on making things high quality."
Helping him in that task was his business partner, engineer Al Conyers. The West & Conyers partnership, said King, was a long and successful one.
"That collaboration between West, the design architect, and Conyers, who is a very skilled engineer with a special expertise in concrete work -- those things affected one another," said King. "The ability to do innovative designs in concrete is very much tied to Conyers' ability to manipulate reinforced concrete."
Both City Hall and the Gateway Bank building, with their cantilevered forms, are examples.
In "The Lives of an Architect," West paints a vivid, unpretentious and sometimes painful picture of his life and loves.
He writes of "the shattering, guilt-ridden enigma of my life" following the death by suicide of his first wife, Joyce. After the birth of their third child in 1960, their marriage deteriorated. Jack West asked for a divorce in early 1969. Weeks later, she was dead.
"I could not wait for my grief to subside," he wrote, so he called a longtime professional acquaintance, Marjorie Proffitt, divorced with four children. Friendship blossomed to romance, and they married on Oct. 10, 1969. But their blended family did not work; they divorced in 1975 before remarrying on Oct. 10, 1979, when West's youngest daughter was grown.
"He was both honest and open in his personality and his architecture," said King. "Pragmatism and tenacity. He knew how he thought design should be, and he kept at it."
Sarasota City Hall, 1966, by Jack West. It is one of 10 local buildings selected to the list of the top 100 buildings in the state by the American Insitute of Architects' Florida chapter. Photo taken 3-27-2012 by Harold Bubil.
West did not dream of being an architect in his youth. He thought he might be an engineer. But while in the Navy during World War II, he was invited to a party at the home of an architect. Built on several levels on the side of Diamond Head, the house fascinated the young West. He knew then that he would become an architect.
A few months later, West was serving aboard a destroyer in the Battle of Okinawa. With his ship under attack by a Japanese kamikaze pilot (a near-miss), and having lost his older brother to the war, he made a decision.
"Life itself, at that moment, seemed to me to be of little significance," he wrote in his autobiography. "Suddenly, the only thing that mattered was the contribution of the individual. If you did not produce for your society, your civilization -- you were merely another success or failure, as judged by each generation's passing fashions. At that precise moment, I resolved to practice architecture without compromise and without regard to money or fashion."
In 1953, having left Twitchell and Rudolph for his own practice in Sarasota, West's resolve was put to the test. A client named Martin Nadelman wanted him to design a $100,000 house on Lido Key. This was a big deal for a young designer; West called it "a gift from the gods." West gave the project his best effort, and Mr. Nadelman was pleased. But Mrs. Nadelman wanted revisions, which West submitted to the clients. "No effort was spared."
The Nadelmans were satisfied, but had one more request: replace the flat roofs with hip roofs.
"I was positive that Ayn Rand's hero in 'The Fountainhead' would surely have shot his client," wrote West. But Jack West was not Howard Roark. Joyce West was pregnant with their second child, and they had no money in the bank. "What the hell. I compromised, as I said I never would do. The house was ... built with hip roofs; the Nadelmans loved it, but I shall never forget my sad decision."
That is the life of an architect. Look at City Hall, and the long promenade from the parking area to the west entrance. Originally there were two reflecting pools on that walkway. Then a city commissioner fell into one of them, and had them filled in. Same thing at the Gateway Bank building, when the client was First Federal Savings & Loan of Manatee County. The bankers painted over the raw concrete cantilevers and filled the reflecting pool with dirt.
"I wished to practice architecture as great art," West wrote in his book.
His compromises difficult to detect, he has left the evidence for the future to judge.
