Every detail of the original Walker Guest House's design and interior decor, as documented by famed midcentury photographer Ezra Stoller, has been addressed in the Walker Guest House Replica, right down to the paint colors. The main difference in the two buildings is that, as the replica will not be inhabited, the bathroom has been placed with a platform for wheelchair access. Staff photo / Harold Bubil; 10-20-2015.
But for an architect, there must be no greater flattery than the imitation that has just been rendered by the Sarasota Architectural Foundation. Besieged by visitors hoping to see the inside of a “Sarasota school” midcentury modern house, none of which are open to the public, SAF set out to build a full-scale replica of one of the foremost architectural experiments of American modernism, the Walker Guest House, designed by Paul Rudolph in 1952.
Inspired by board member Dan Snyder’s brainstorm, SAF raised more than $150,000 to rebuild the 576-square-foot house as a temporary educational exhibit on the grounds of the Ringling Museum in Sarasota. Located between the Ulla F. Searing Wing and Mable Ringling’s Rose Garden, the house was furnished last week with early 1950s decor, appliances and even books and magazines.
The 576-square-foot beach cottage as it appears with the flaps down at The Ringling. Architect/builder Joe King and his crew built the Walker Guest House Replica. Fort Myers architect Joyce Owens drew Paul Rudolph's original plans into a computerized design program to create construction documents. Staff photo / Harold Bubil; 10-20-2015.
It will be opened to the public with a ceremony on Nov. 6 as part of SAF’s second-annual Sarasota MOD Weekend of lectures, tours, dinners and parties. A complementary exhibition, “Paul Rudolph: The Guest Houses,” is now open through Dec. 6 at The Ringling. (Information: SarasoataMOD.com.)
The theme of Sarasota MOD is the career of Rudolph, the rebellious architect and champion of expressive modernism, whose career began in Sarasota in the 1940s and ‘50s. The grounds of The Ringling are open to the public without charge, as is the Walker Guest House Replica when it is staffed by docents over the next 11 months.
“We are very interested in broadening our collection in many ways,” Ringling director Stephen High told the Herald-Tribune earlier this year. “One area is the understanding and documentation the midcentury Sarasota School of Architecture.
“The Walker Guest House is such a classic piece by Paul Rudolph,” High said. “It can expand the knowledge of the architecture of that time.”
Built in 1952-53 on remote Sanibel Island near Fort Myers, the Walker Guest House, still in use by the Walker family, is hailed as a triumph of adapting modern materials — plywood and plate glass — into a workable solution for a beach cottage in the days before air-conditioning.
Flaps up: Architect Paul Rudoph spoke about the need for "caves" -- warm, private spaces -- as well as "goldfish bowls" -- glass houses with big views and transparency. With the Walker Guest House, he created both. Staff photo / Harold Bubil; 10-20-2015.
Its design is distinctive because the 24- by 24-foot house is shaded by large panels that can be raised and lowered using ropes, pulleys and counterweights that look like cannonballs. Outboard posts supply the support. Screens let in air, and large plate-glass windows let in light. Rudolph believed that people needed “caves” as much as the “goldfish bowls” that were championed by modernist architects of the International Style, and the Walker Guest House is both, depending on whether the flaps are up or down.
Rudolph (1918-1997) was influential and, despite being trained in the ways of the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius at Harvard, sought to supplement the spare and limited vocabulary of the International Style.
In 1957, readers of Architectural Record grouped the Walker Guest House with Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, in Plano, Illinois, and Phillip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, as the most important houses of the 20th century. In 2012, WGH was the highest-rated house still used as a residence in the American Institute of Architects/Florida chapter's “100 Years, 100 Places” online voting competition, coming in at No. 31.
The replica was built by architect/author/contractor Joe King and his team at King Ranch in Manatee County in such a way that it could be deconstructed and moved for display at other venues. The Ringling is the first such stop.
“Joe King outdid himself,” said Fort Myers architect Joyce Owens. “It is so beautifully built. The replica is as fresh today as it must have been when they built the original.”
Building a house than can be disassembled and moved (in two tractor trailers) has added to the cost. SAF originally estimated the structure would cost $60,000, so it budgeted $100,000 just to be safe. It became evident that $150,000 was more like it, but in fact the cost has reached $250,000, or about $434 a square foot (and there is no land cost). About $15,000 has been spent on furnishings, so the labor has been the biggest expense, Snyder said.
“Making it movable made everything go a little bit berserk,” Snyder said. “And it had to be exactly the same dimensions as the original. That meant a lot of milling, and Joe exploring different options.”
SAF board members Eliott Himelfarb, left, chairman Janet Minker and Dan Snyder, who envisioned the creation of the Walker Guest House Replica. Staff photo / Harold Bubil; 10-20-2015.
Although he doesn’t admit it, Snyder is being credited as the idea man behind the replica project. In January 2012, Snyder, SAF President Janet Minker and board member Jim Keaton visited Fort Myers to see architect Joyce Owens’ exhibition on midcentury modern architecture in Southwest Florida. It was then that they learned more about the Walker Guest House, which was represented in the exhibit by a model. A year later, Owens took SAF leaders to Sanibel to see the house.
“That started our romance with the house,” said Snyder.
“Dan was definitely the catalyst behind it,” Owens said. “He was the energy that pushed it forward. And Janet and Elliott (Himelfarb) contributed equal energy. When I did my exhibit on Southwest Florida midcentury modernism, I featured the Walker Guest House, and that is when their awareness of it was raised. They didn’t appreciate that it was there, that it was on Sanibel, that it was in good condition and in good hands. Somewhere along the line, Dan said, ‘We could build this thing and bring it to Sarasota.’ ”
“Janet would get a lot of calls from people visiting Sarasota, and they wanted to visit a midcentury house,” Snyder recalled. “Of course, none are open, so there is this huge demand. The Walker Guest House was of a size that you could actually think about reproducing it. It was a doable project.”
Owens input the original Rudolph plans into a computer-assisted design program. Working from those plans and the original Rudolph blueprints, King and crew assembled the building, out of the public eye, under a farm pavilion earlier this year at King Ranch in Manatee County.
“Whenever you start a project, you have expectations, and I really think this one exceeds expectations,” said Snyder. “We are just so incredibly fortunate to have Joe King. Not only is he an architect and a builder, but also he’s an expert on Rudolph who wrote a book, and he was totally into it, to an incredible degree. That is one reason why we went over budget. I don’t know anyone else who could have done it, who would have met the same objectives.”
“We worked really hard to pay attention to the original,” said King. “We used some pretty nice and pretty expensive materials. The exterior exposed wood members are laminated veneer lumber — very straight and strong. We were able to mill it to the shapes we needed. It is not intended to be a finish, so we did a lot of intensive work planing and sanding and using wood fillers to try to get it to plane out.”
The Walker Guest House Replica has been meticulously crafted and assembled by architect/contractor Joe King and his team of carpenters to duplicate architect Paul Rudolph's originial design. Staff photo / Harold Bubil; 10-20-2015.
King admires Rudolph’s building for how it “touches the sky, how it touches the ground, how it turns the corners. This project has been all about learning along the way and finding opportunities to make connections of visual and architectural and assembly sort of things.”
Snyder said he was motivated by the fear that the replica would not pass muster with the architectural press.
“My personal objective was to make it so perfect that some crazy critic from New York doesn’t come down and say, ‘That gray should have been two shades lighter.’ ”
The SAF team relied heavily on 1953 images of the original by the famed architectural photographer Ezra Stoller. That is how carpenter Dale Rieke of Wood Street Studio was able to fabricate the furniture that was designed by Rudolph, and how Snyder was able to curate the furnishings.
“The Stoller photographs are so important,” Snyder said.
As in the 1950s, the SAF expects that the replica will gain “a lot of national and international press, because it is midcentury and midcentury is still hot,” Snyder said. “And it is part of this small-home movement, and the whole energy-efficiency thing. It is all passive, rather than cooling with technology.”
Although Rudolph designed a larger house for the Sanibel Island site while he was still associated with Ralph Twitchell, it was never built. The guest house was designed in just two weeks as a temporary housing solution. It ended up being the only house on the property until the early 1970s, when Dr. Walter Walker remarried. Elaine Walker, who still lives there, thought the guest house was too small for use as a fulltime residence, so her husband built a larger house by a different designer.
Flaps down: Architect Paul Rudoph spoke about the need for "caves" -- warm, private spaces -- as well as "goldfish bowls" -- glass houses with big views and transparency. With the Walker Guest House, he created both. Staff photo / Harold Bubil; 10-20-2015.
For Rudolph, writes Tim Rohan in his 2014 book “The Architecture of Paul Rudolph,” “The Walker Guest House was a breakthrough. He realized that he could design buildings and interiors that could stimulate the emotions and bodies of the user, while still reflecting his own strongly held and increasingly critical views about modern architecture.”
“The bigger picture is, how do we build appropriately for our climate, wherever we are in the world, to minimize energy use and exploit the climate you are in?” asks Owens. “These are lessons for building in the future. Let’s look at this very simple building and see what we can learn from it.”
Now, on the Ringling campus, those lessons are about to be presented to a new audience.
“The real benefit at the Ringling is the exposure to individuals that probably would not make a special trip to see an exhibit someplace that is less available,” Snyder said, noting that The Ringling reports its museums have 384,000 visitors annually. "If you just get a small percentage of them (to look at the replica), you are exposing a huge number of people to a topic they would never otherwise be exposed to.
“Being there and having people walk by and engage in it, you are no longer preaching to the choir. You are really starting to reach a broader audience and engage them in architecture. That is the value.”
