After the pioneering Sarasota College of Structure member died, Florida architect Max Strang stepped in to protect the modernist’s Winter Haven house and workplace.
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For Sarasota, Florida, architect Max Strang, the chance to revive the house of modernist architect Gene Leedy was the end result of a lifelong calling. Strang, whose namesake structure, interiors, and panorama agency has places of work in Sarasota, Winter Haven, and Miami, was raised in a Winter Haven house designed by the Sarasota College of Structure founding member, and spent his childhood visiting the home that Leedy designed for himself and lived in for greater than 60 years. (Strang’s dad and mom had been shut with the Leedy household.)
Gene Leedy’s Winter Haven, Florida, house was the primary of 11 Craney Spec Homes the Sarasota College architect designed after he moved to the world within the early days of his profession. Every of the properties, commissioned by native developer and building supplies provider Dick Craney as prototype homes for neighboring tons, had been designed primarily based on a four-by-four-foot organizing grid, permitting for simple variations or customization.
Courtesy of Max Strang
The Gene Leedy Home is one among 11 within the Craney Spec Homes Historic District, a group of modular properties constructed by the architect between 1956 and 1958 within the Florida fashionable fashion that Leedy and different early Sarasota College figures—amongst them Paul Rudolph, Ralph Twitchell, and Victor Lundy—pioneered through the post-World Battle II housing increase. (The stretch of Winter Haven is understood colloquially as “Leedy Land” or “Leedy Row.”) On the time, Leedy and his friends’ use of open ground plans and uncovered framing, in addition to louvered home windows and sliding glass doorways that permit in pure mild and cross breezes, was thought of radical in residential structure. Leedy’s personal home exemplified many defining traits of the burgeoning regional fashion, from its mixture of concrete, heat wooden, and floor-to-ceiling glass to its open structure and cantilever overhangs; components that each built-in the structure with the native local weather and provided safety from the weather (which, in Florida, embody warmth, rain, and mosquitos).
Architect Max Strang (pictured above proper, with Gene Leedy) grew up in a midcentury Winter Haven house designed by the celebrated modernist and finally labored in Leedy’s workplace. After Leedy’s 2018 loss of life, Strang purchased two of the architect’s properties: his 1956 house and close by workplace, in-built 1961, the place he’d lengthy lived and labored.
Picture: James Jackman
Whereas Leedy’s designs performed an enormous position in Strang’s childhood, it wasn’t till Strang left Winter Haven to attend the College of Florida in Gainesville (Leedy’s alma mater) that he realized the profundity of the architect’s affect. “What was attention-grabbing is when you’re surrounded by all Leedy’s structure on this small city, it was regular,” he says. “[When] I went off to school I actually missed being in a city that was surrounded by nice structure.” It was that revelation that led Strang to enroll in structure faculty, and when it got here time for his skilled internship, the chance to work with Leedy was the plain alternative.
Strang returned the home to its authentic ensemble of midcentury furnishings, sifting by means of items Leedy had amassed over time and including in some period-appropriate picks.
Picture: James Jackman
See the total story on Dwell.com: Icons Solely: Who Higher to Restore Two Hallmarks of Gene Leedy’s Legacy Than His Longtime Protégé?Associated tales:The Rules of Midcentury Design Endure at This Modernist House in MaineHis Modernist Concepts for L.A. Residing Had been Dismissed. Now, They May Be a Blueprint for RebuildingBefore & After: They Saved One of many Final Midcentury Properties in Their Lakefront Neighborhood
