Frank Lloyd Wright’s Campus Is a Pleasure, and a Challenge

Emile E. Watson Administration Building, Florida Southern College
(Chronicle photograph by Lawrence Biemiller)

Florida Southern College has the only college campus planned by Frank Lloyd Wright, easily the most famous and inventive architect in American history, and it has the largest single collection of Wright buildings anywhere — many of them built partly by students.

But for a liberal-arts college with a modest endowment, that’s a mixed blessing. Striking and historically important as they are, the Wright buildings present a long list of challenges: Some have structural problems that can be traced to Wright’s having relied on new and untested designs. Many are too small for the college’s current needs. And all have been hard to modernize affordably. A full report appears in The Chronicle.