S.251a - Florida Southern College Faculty Housing/future Visitor Center –

Frank Lloyd Wright Way at College Ave., Lakeland, Florida

Wright designed faculty housing as part of the Child of the Sun campus for Florida Southern. Two designs were created – one-bedroom and two-bedroom. These designs went unbuilt at the time, largely for funding reasons (the FHA refused to finance houses with flat roofs).

The college decided a few years ago to build one of these designs to house a visitor center. These photos show the finished structure as well as the construction process. It was a unique opportunity to watch a FLW house being built from the ground up.

A neighboring house has been converted to a welcome center and gift shop. Tickets to tour the faculty residence are available there. Polk County residents enjoy a hefty discount on ticket prices. Interior photography is not permitted.

The city embraced this project by renaming McDonald Street as Frank Lloyd Wright Way (a move not without controversy).

An excellent website with a chronicle of the construction can be found at http://www.buildingtheusonianhouse.com/. I highly recommend it. That site does a much better job than mine.

In the 4th edition of The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright – A Complete Catalog, Prof. Storrer assigned this project a catalog number of S.251a.

Photographed in 2014.

ARCHIVE: EARLIER CONSTRUCTION PHOTOS