To borrow Le Corbusier’s most famous quotation, the Walker Guest House is a “machine for living,” all right.
A time machine.
Members of the Sarasota Architectural Foundation got a close look at it during a barbecue a week ago at King Ranch on Caruso Road in Manatee County. What they saw was a museum piece in the making. The replica, being built by SAF member Joe King’s Old Cypress Construction under a pavilion on the ranch, is on schedule to be in place on the grounds of the Ringling Museum in time for the second-annual Sarasota MOD Weekend in November.
Members of the Sarasota Architectural Foundation examine a replica of the Walker Guest House, designed in 1952 on Sanibel Island by famed architect Paul Rudolph, at SAF member Joe King's ranch in Manatee County. Built by King and his construction company, the house will be taken apart and reassembled on the grounds of the Ringling Museum of Art in time for Sarasota MOD Weekend in November. It will serve as a museum piece there for about a year. Staff photo / Harold Bubil; 5-31-2015.
“The concept for the exhibit is that you will be able to go inside and sit on the furniture, pick up McCall’s magazine from July 1954, and maybe absorb a little about the period,” said Dan Snyder of the SAF. “It was making it available to all of us to have that midcentury experience.“
The original still stands on Sanibel, near Fort Myers, and is still owned by the Walker family.
When Snyder and Janet Minker of the SAF visited an exhibit about midcentury modern design in Southwest Florida that was mounted by Fort Myers architect Joyce Owens several years ago, they saw a model of the Walker Guest House — and an idea was born.
“Joyce knew Elaine Walker, and without that connection, this would not have happened,” Snyder said. “One of the driving things (behind the replica project) was that people who come to town, and even local people, want to visit a midcentury house, and none are open to the public. So we thought, ‘Maybe we should build one that people could visit and experience.’ “
It helped that the Walker Guest House is only 24 by 24 feet, not counting the “outrigger” posts and beams that give it the appearance of “a spider in the sand,” as Miami Herald architecture critic Alastair Gordon described it. And it is made of wood.
“It was built as an experiment in 1952,” said Joe King, “and we are building it as an experiment that has to be taken apart and put back together somewhere else. It is a real benefit that we can build a building out of the weather. How often does that happen? We are under a roof structure and on a concrete slab.
"When it was built, it was built to stay in one place. We have the task of pre-building it here, figuring it out, and then taking it apart and installing it at Ringling.“
King liked the idea of test-building the house in the seclusion of his ranch, rather than having a steady stream of Ringling Museum visitors walk past the site and seeing him scratch his head — “people wondering what I was doing,” he added.
“There are more challenges than I thought there would be,” King said. “Building it to be movable is one of the challenges. It is really great to be here offsite and figuring it all out.“
His construction team includes Jim Carlton, Greg Maynard, Shane Carr and Dustin Rodriguez.
“It is coming together nicely,” King said.“The building is going to have to be in a public environment, where originally it was a private guest house. We need to make it comfortable and reasonable to get in and out of the building. Where the original bathroom was, there is a hole. Our idea is to have a lift there for accessibility. And that way we don’t have to do a ramp, which would look weird in the photographs. It would be very large and expensive.“
The $150,000 project has been largely funded by a gift from Dr. Michael Kalman. Pro Build, a specialty lumberyard in Bradenton, is a sponsor.
King said taking the house apart and putting it back together at The Ringling will take about two months, including site work and building a foundation.
