Almost a century after bold European and American designers searched for a new style for a new industrial age – an approach later called Modernism – the architecture and designs of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier among others are now considered timeless classics. Later experiments in American residential architecture by Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, and others photographed by Julius Shulman shaped the iconic look of mid-twentieth-century modernism in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, in Florida’s Central West Coast, the post-war boom launched the careers of pioneering Florida architects whose regional style, called Sarasota Modern, highlighted new features that we take for granted today: large sliding-glass doors, progressive ventilation systems and floating staircases.
A recent exhibition at the University of Miami School of Architecture featured the designs of one renowned Sarasota School architect, Mark Hampton, FAIA, whose buildings span the state from Tampa to Miami. His architecture, always at a human scale, seamlessly unites indoors and out, flooding interiors with natural light.
His Horizon House, built in Tampa in 1963 as an entry in the concrete industries’ nationwide competition, showed Hampton’s prowess to realize the strength and grace of concrete as a building material. His design for Horizon House won first prize and was published in Architectural Record Houses of 1964, recognized as one of the twenty best-designed US residences that year.
More than forty years later, Hampton, in a Coconut Grove private practice since 1974, was approached by the current owners of Horizon House to oversee the addition of a second floor and to restore original features. Working with Bret Azzarelli and John Prokop of Elements Architects & Interior Designers in Tampa, Hampton used all the design elements of the original house while incorporating the latest technologies for insulation, roofing, waterproofing and electronics.
In 1963, the competition’s mandate was to design and build an all-concrete residence for less than $25,000. The original three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,900-square-foot house contained a concrete terrazzo floor, cast-concrete brick walls, several exposed aggregate concrete patios, a pre-cast concrete slab roof, and cast-in-place concrete scuppers that defined its unique exterior appearance. The then-novel arrangement of rooms put the kitchen at the center of the cross-shaped floor plan, which had the added advantage of keeping the two children’s bedrooms and the master bedroom well separated from each other and from entertaining areas.
