SARASOTA -- When he was hired as architect of Sarasota’s New College in September 1963 after an 18-month search, I.M. Pei said the 115-acre campus he was about to design would be his biggest challenge yet.
I.M. Pei, one of the most famous architects of the past 60 years, designed the freshman dormitory buildings at New College in Sarasota. Construction started in 1965 and the buildings, built around a courtyard filled with royal palms, were completed in 1967. Local architects were upset that Pei got the job. (Staff photo / Harold Bubil)
Pei, now widely considered one of the five greatest architects of the 20th century, also said then that the campus could not be “a stylish piece of work — it must last and be flexible enough to accommodate change.”
Financial problems prevented the fledgling college from constructing more than a few Pei buildings before he resigned from the project in 1967, but the three dormitories that were built have met his goal. They are housing their 50th class of students.
Despite rumors in recent years that the “Pei dormitories” — also known as first, second and third court — on the campus’ east side might be demolished, New College knows what it has, and has taken steps so the buildings will be useful for the foreseeable future.
One of them was “significantly renovated” in 2008, and a second in 2014, at a total cost of $2 million. The third also will be renovated, said the college’s facilities manager, Alan Burr, but he could not say when.
“The cost of construction has gone up, so it will be more for the last one,” Burr said. “We do not have any resources to replace them.”
The work on the first two courts included replacing flooring, replastering walls and replacing new light and bathroom fixtures, said Burr, who has been facilities manager since 2013.
Students have reported moisture-intrusion and mold issues over the years. “It is usually the old stormwater system” that causes such problems, Burr added. “It is a unique thing with Pei’s design. In some places, the patios drain water into a catch basin underneath the buildings, where it is pumped out. We have restructured some of those areas to drain away from the building.”
“Pei’s buildings are very high-maintenance,” longtime Sarasota architect Carl Abbott said. But from an aesthetic standpoint, “they are wonderful.”
Last summer, some of the original ceramic courtyard tiles were replaced with concrete pavers. The old tiles were “slippery and falling apart,” Burr said. “They were past their useful life. We will be replacing those as we can afford to, as well.”
“We will continue to work on renovations of the Pei community,” Mark Stier, the associate dean of student life, told the Catalyst, the college’s student newspaper, this year.
The history
Chien Chung "Didi" Pei, left, Li Chung "Sandi" Pei and Ieoh Ming "I.M." Pei. (Herald-Tribune archive)
Ieoh Ming Pei was 46 when New College, which was founded in 1960 but did not admit students until 1964, selected him from among an international slate of architects to design the campus.
Such noted designers as John Carl Warnecke, the man who designed President Kennedy’s grave site, and Louis Kahn were considered, Abbott said.
Phil Hiss, then chairman of the Sarasota County school board, oversaw New College’s formation as chairman of its board of trustees. For years, Sarasota’s civic leaders had said the city was “a college town without a college” and yearned to get one. The city even made a bid to get the Air Force Academy in the late 1940s. Instead, it was built in Colorado on land provided by Dallas Dort, who later became a New College trustee, donor and acting president, according to “New College: The First Three Decades,” by Furman C. Arthur.
Hiss chose then Herald-Tribune publisher David Lindsay Jr. to chair the trustees’ architecture and building committee. Given the college’s high academic goals (Hiss wanted its educational quality to be the equal of Harvard, Yale or Stanford), the board felt that a world-class architect must be chosen. Hiss also served on the architecture committee.
Hiss was a champion of the midcentury modern design movement that decades later would be known as the Sarasota School of architecture. As school board chairman, Hiss hired architects such as Paul Rudolph, Victor Lundy, Bert Brosmith, Ralph and William Zimmerman and Jack West to design public school buildings.
But for New College, none of those men were considered, although Brosmith did serve as Pei’s local consultant.
“Dave (Lindsay) was a Zimmerman fan,” said retired architect Tim Seibert, who started his firm in Sarasota in 1955. “The father and son did the newspaper building and a lot of work for the Lindsay family.”
“Lindsay did not like Rudolph,” Abbott said.
Said Shirley Hiss, Phil Hiss’ widow, “David wasn’t fond of him. They were not compatible in their thinking.”
Lindsay’s search committee, boosted by a Ford Foundation grant, consulted with several noted architects and professors of architecture, and unanimously decided that Pei, a native of Suzhou, China, who came to America in 1935 at age 18, was their man.
“New College is the greatest challenge I have ever faced,” Pei said in the Sept. 24, 1963, Herald-Tribune. “It is easy to build an additional building on a campus where the environment already exists. Here we have to create environment. If we are successful, New College will gain for many hundreds of years. We must not fail.”
Twenty-five years later, Pei would create his landmark Pyramid at the Louvre Museum in Paris. In December 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy chose Pei’s firm to design the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.
Space and money constraints
Aerial photo of the New College campus showing dorms designed by architect I.M. Pei, looking west across Tamiami Trail, toward College Hall and Sarasota Bay. (Photo provided by New College)
The original budget for New College’s first phase was $15 million, about $45 million today. But money was an issue from the start.
Basically, all the embryonic college had in real estate was the former Charles Ringling mansion, to be called College Hall, and the land between it and U.S. 41, along with a few acres on the east side of the Tamiami Trail that was leased from the airport authority.
Pei initially pledged that his plan would cross U.S. 41 only as a last resort, according to Arthur’s book. The architect also wanted to tear down College Hall, an idea that Hiss endorsed but that the college’s president, George Baughman, opposed. College Hall was the school’s only icon, the president argued. Pei is believed to have at one point wanted to build the dormitories on stilts in Sarasota Bay.
In January 1964, Pei was ready to unveil his plans for the east campus, now known as the Pei Campus, to the press in the music room in College Hall, according to Arthur’s book. But just minutes before, the trustees were in a side room, arguing over where the money was going to come from. Also, the trustees were stunned by Pei’s construction price tag of $25 per square foot at a time when commercial buildings were going up for $10 a square foot. They told Pei he would have to cut costs, Arthur wrote.
Then everyone went into the music room and smiled for the newspaper reporters and photographers. What the press did not know was that board chairman Hiss and college president Baughman were at odds and Hiss was about to resign, which he did in February.
“Baughman was the antithesis of Phil,” Seibert said.
“That is an understatement,” Shirley Hiss said.
Baughman was determined to open the campus to students — 100 of them — by the fall of 1964. The plan for the west campus would not be ready in time, so he pressed ahead with development of “temporary” buildings on the east side of the Trail.
The first buildings were the dormitories — sorely needed, as the first freshman students were housed in the Landmark resort hotel on Lido Key, and in an old structure near College Hall known as the Barn. The first of the three dorms opened in March 1965.
Pei’s contribution
Aerial photo of the New College campus showing dorms designed by architect I.M. Pei. (Photo provided by New College)
Pei, now 98, entered the pantheon of the greats in 1983, when he was awarded the fifth Pritzker Prize, which is described as a “Nobel Prize for architects.” He also has won the AIA Gold Medal.
Abbott, who worked in Pei’s New York office when it was designing New College’s Hamilton Center in the 1960s, said local architects were not happy that they weren’t considered for the job.
“Hiss was after major world names,” said Abbott, who started his own practice in Sarasota in 1966.
“The thinking was, ‘Let’s get a nationally known architect.’ They had a lot of nationally known architects there already,” John Howey, author of “The Sarasota School of Architecture,” said in a recent interview. “I wouldn’t say it ended the Sarasota School, but all the known architects were upset because after all the publicity they brought to Sarasota, they became forgotten by the community and key people.”
The three buildings that Pei designed house more than 250 students in double- and triple-occupancy rooms, each with a private bathroom. Each building has small courtyards, and the outdoor Palm Court, with its array of 24 royal palms, is a focal point of student life.
The rooms are 15 by 15 feet. Some rooms have covered porches or large balconies. “The clustered construction, communal spaces and orientation around Palm Court affords Pei residents a strong sense of community,” according to the New College website.
Students in first court do not have a communal lounge, as residents of second court do. Second court residents boast that their building is the best of the three. In an edition of the student newspaper earlier this year, one student even referred to first court as “the slums of Pei.”
From the ground, they follow the strict geometry and language of International School modernism. But passengers aboard planes departing from adjacent Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport look down upon three buildings that look a good bit like mazes. The concept is that of a Mediterranean village, with hidden courtyards and entryways that were intended to protect the student body from too many outside distractions.
“Pei wanted concrete that was a tan color,” Tim Seibert recalled. “They had to find some manufacturer who would make it. Only a famous architect can get that complicated.”
Pei’s association with New College was brief, Howey wrote.
By 1967, “problems with and constraints on architectural design at New College had become so great that I.M. Pei resigned from the project.”
