Thad Buckner Building

 

 

 

 

We visited Florida Southern College to study Frank Lloyd Wright’s concrete block designs for the seven buildings he built there. THis is the Thad Buckner Building, formerly the E.T. Roux Library completed in 1945.

The blocks are a development of his textile block work in Los Angeles from the ’20s and have similar joint details (I will post some pictures of some of these where the walls have failed). The character of the work emerges though his invention of these building elements. There are abundant technical problems with the blocks (the accelerated decay gives some of his buildings a picturesque quality) but I find them really helpful in thinking through how to make building components that are appropriate to the content of the architecture.