THE UMBRELLA HOUSE

Sarasota, FL

I arrive at 8 AM for the sketch of Cà d'Zan, not realizing the grounds did not open until 9:30. So I Uber’ed across the bay to sketch another local architectural gem: the Umbrella House, by architect Paul Rudolph. Built as the show home for Sarasota's Lido Shores neighborhood, the structure blends international style modernism with indigenous tropical design. It is among the preeminent works of the Sarasota School of Architecture and considered one of the most remarkable homes of the twentieth century. The result was a two-story, open-plan box concept, with operable jalousie windows on all sides to facilitate natural ventilation. Over this box was built a large simple frame with a latticed ‘parasol’ (flat umbrella roof) overlaying the house, the rear patio, and the pool. It served as a tropical pavilion, or pergola, creating patterns of shade over virtually the entire property. Rudolph designed this secondary roof to float slightly above the house, roof in order to enable air movement and promote cooling. In stark contrast to Cà d'Zan, the Umbrellas House is totally unadorned. In Rudolph’s early years, he had been a student of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus Movement, a precursor to modernist architecture. Gropius espoused unit construction, that is the combination of standardized units to form a technologically simple but functionally complex whole – which can be seen at its best in the Umbrella house.