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The Museum of Florida History is hosting a special exhibit, The
Florida Home: Modern Living, 1945-1965, which is on loan from
the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, in Miami. Visitors
can view the exhibit at the Museum in Tallahassee from June 2,
2005 to January 2, 2006. The following text from the exhibit
covers some the unique architectural styles, which developed in
Florida, particularly in the Miami area, in the mid-20th
century.
During the two decades following
World War II, population growth and an expanding economy
transformed the landscape of Florida. Extensive migration from
other states, new highways, the rise of jet aviation, the
reinvigoration of tourism and increasing investment in military
installations propelled a far-reaching boom.
The hundreds of thousands of
people who settled in Florida sought housing, particularly new
homes in the suburban areas of the state’s metropolitan regions.
Rising incomes, low-interest government loans and efficiencies
in the building industry all contributed to the construction of
an unprecedented number of houses. Architectural styles
reflected the postwar generation’s desire for modern
homes—homes that expressed the optimistic, future-oriented mood
of the times and that offered interlocking spaces and
furnishings for comfortable living.
In the Miami metropolitan area,
the focus of this exhibition, architects adapted modernist
design concepts and technologies to a sub-tropical environment
to create houses uniquely suited to South Florida lifestyles.
They employed vast glass and screened walls that revolutionized
the surfaces of houses and produced unparalleled openness to the
environment. At the same time, they aspired to a spirit of
authenticity that was rooted in the ideas of the region’s early
naturalists. Although their houses were often radically
innovative in composition, architects followed vernacular
building strategies and used locally available types of wood,
concrete and masonry. The result was a new type of home that
redefined the boundary between indoors and outdoors. This
embrace and celebration of the tropical environment constitute
the most vital and original contribution of South Florida
architects to postwar housing.
The Postwar Transformation of Miami
During World
War II, Miami was a major center for the training, recreation
and convalescence of American armed forces. Following the war,
many GIs, as well as thousands of other Americans, settled in
South Florida, where they pursued dreams of success and
contentment. During the postwar years, Miami evolved from a
seasonal resort city into a year-round metropolis. In 1945 Dade
County’s population was approximately 300,000; by 1970 it had
surpassed 1.2 million. Housing developments sprawled in all
directions, with the reclamation of more land from the
Everglades and the expansion of streets and highways. The 1944
Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (“GI Bill”) helped many men and
women to purchase houses and to study at the University of
Miami.
Like in other
“sunbelt cities,” automobile-oriented commercial architecture
dominated primary streetscapes throughout the Miami metropolitan
region. With the construction of the Interstate Highway network,
a series of “new downtowns” soon radiated around the city’s
historic core and served the growing postwar neighborhoods.
These emerging town centers were the product of a retailing
revolution defined by shopping malls. Families flocked to the
malls to purchase an array of goods for their new homes.
Designing the South Florida Modern Home
There was
ample precedent for the development of the tropical home in
postwar South Florida. Porches for living and sleeping, walled
patios, terraces, balconies, habitable roof decks, loggias,
verandas and exterior stairways were all elements characteristic
of the region’s earlier architectural styles: the traditional
wood vernacular, Mediterranean Revival and the “Art Deco” modern
of the 1930s. Outdoor-oriented spaces were the building blocks
of a distinct South Florida residential architecture, which
postwar architects pursued in new ways. South Florida architects
were also influenced by national architectural trends, such as
the Case Study Houses—affordable modern homes designed by
leading architects between 1945 and 1966 for the Los Angeles
area.
For South
Floridians, the tropical home was a vehicle for creating a
domestic utopia: a world in which families fantasized of
unfettered contact with the warm, lush environment. This
environment, however, also posed many challenges: annoying
insects, intense sun, frequent rain and overwhelming humidity.
In providing shelter and protection, South Florida architects
employed raised floors, overhanging eaves and cross ventilation,
while experimenting with continuities in indoor and outdoor
spaces. Narrow rooms, shed roofs and large louvered windows
helped to move breezes through houses.
The most
conspicuous feature of the tropical home was the expansive
screened porch or “Florida Room.” These all-purpose outdoor
living spaces became more affordable with technological
advancements, including “Lumite” plastic screening (instead of
wire mesh) and lightweight wood or aluminum frames. Although
Miami’s ubiquitous grid of streets ran north-south and
east-west, Florida Rooms were often oriented southeast for
maximum exposure to trade winds.
Modern Living in South Florida
The tropical
home was more than just a house type—it was a multifaceted ideal
that merged architecture, environment and lifestyle. This ideal
developed around themes of active and passive leisure, pleasure
and delight, and maximum access to the outdoors. Miami architect
Igor Polevitzky noted that “Floridians as a whole are a little
different from the average American . . . we have moved here,
and in the moving we did more than just move to another house or
another state—we have moved into a totally new pioneering
environment and climate. We have moved spiritually, as well as
physically.” Polevitzky and other postwar architects designed a
new type of modern home for the thousands of Americans who
settled in South Florida.
The openness
and spatial flexibility of the modern house, combined with a
tropical climate, engendered new trends in family life. In
traditional house types, domestic functions typically were
differentiated by separate rooms. In the modern Miami house,
however, cooking and eating, relaxing and playing, and even
sleeping could all occur in an outdoor-oriented Florida Room.
Swimming and gardening also became integral components of an
indoor-outdoor continuum. In essence, the South Florida home
allowed the whole family to work and recreate together in a
warm, shared space.
Architecture
and building journals, news magazines and the homemaker press
marketed this informal “playground” lifestyle nationally and
internationally, thus inspiring continued migration to South
Florida. South Florida was no longer simply a vacation
destination. It was now possible to imagine tropical leisure as
a permanent way of life.
Igor Polevitzky and the First
Heller House
Igor
Polevitzky was a decisive figure in the development of the
tropical modern home in Florida. Polevitzky was born in St.
Petersburg, Russia, in 1911, emigrated with his family to the
U.S. and graduated from the Department of Architecture at the
University of Pennsylvania in 1934. That same year, he settled
in Miami, where he quickly acquired a reputation for
sophisticated commercial and residential projects. Polevitzky
initially engaged the tropical environment with his “tropotype”
series of houses, which were raised cottages with wrapping
balconies. After World War II, his atmospherically transparent
houses helped to characterize a new regional modernism. They
emphasized the gentle, embracing qualities of a tropical
atmosphere that allowed people to live in the outdoors.
The house in
the Florida Home exhibit is a museum reconstruction of a
residence that Polevitzky designed in Miami in 1947 for
appliance salesman Michael Heller. It is a transitional house
that balances the ascetic minimalism of Polevitzky’s postwar GI
house types and the more dynamic screened environments of his
later “birdcage” houses. A modest one-story box with a shed
roof, the house is notable for the elaboration of its screened
patio as an extension of the living space. Screened porches and
patios were not a new element in Miami; but here the idea was,
as Architectural Forum remarked, “extended to its logical
conclusion, an airy large (19 x 30 ft.) cage, framed in
aluminum.” The screened patio was almost as large as the house
itself and created an alternative recreational environment. Its
new role within the home was announced by its name: the “outdoor
living area.”
South Florida’s Modern Houses
Imported from
Europe, the 1930s “International Style” house—made of glass,
white walls and flat roofs—was never popular in the U.S.,
although a significant number were built in Miami Beach.
Modernism’s survival was based on architects’ ability to propose
less threatening options for the middle-income family. Spurred
by Frank Lloyd Wright, the search for a new vernacular modern
home accelerated after World War II. The modern became regional,
with houses less rigid in design than the International Style
and closer to the public’s desires. White walls and glass boxes
were no longer the exclusive image of modernity. The warmth of
brick, stone and wood could also be modern, as could sloped
roofs and courtyards. Glass remained popular but was often
screened by awnings, overhangs and louvers, or incorporated in
sliding doors.
After World
War II, South Florida architects created a new type of modern
house. They conceived of their houses as experiments and took
great pride in solving specific problems related to living in a
tropical environment. Paradoxically, South Florida’s outdoor
living ideal reached its apex during the 1950s, a period that
corresponded with the integration of air-conditioning into the
house. In an age defined by technological mastery of comfort,
openness to the outdoors and natural breezes was a deliberate
choice in lifestyle and aesthetics. With the development of
cheaper central air-conditioning during the 1960s, however, the
embrace of South Florida’s tropical environment declined in
favor of the sealed box which, whatever its style, continues to
dominate residential architecture at the beginning of the
twenty-first century.
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Interiors of the exhibit.
Courtesy of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida
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