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Architect's Vision Realized As Fountain Comes To Life

By Greg Fight / Tampa Tribune

A large crowd was on hand Thursday evening to watch the unveiling of Florida Southern College's restored Frank Lloyd Wright Water Dome, a giant fountain with jets that suspend the water like a dome. The original fountain, finished in 1948, never worked properly. The restoration uses new technology.

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By BILLY TOWNSEND, The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 26, 2007

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LAKELAND - Forty-eight years after his death, Frank Lloyd Wright, the quintessential American architect, still makes history. And his creations still draw crowds.

Just ask the 3,000 or more students, alumni, architecture buffs and curiosity seekers who jammed the plaza surrounding the re-created Water Dome at Florida Southern College on Thursday night.

They cheered, counted down and even did the wave, waiting for the moment when 74 high-powered water jets finally would create the 45-foot-tall circular cloak of water Wright penciled into the heart of his Florida Southern vision more than 60 years ago.

It has taken that long for technology and funding to catch up with Wright's design audacity. But they have caught up. And the Wright collection at Florida Southern College, the architect's 'final symphony' as one speaker put it, has a new signature piece.

'The size of this crowd makes it clear, at least in terms of fountains, that size does matter,' joked architect Jeff Baker, who headed up restoration of the fountain, which measures 160 feet in diameter.

Wright, Baker said, pursued 'organic architecture,' a style, often at intimate scale, that sought to mesh with both function and the surrounding landscape. 'You can sense the imprint of Wright's soul here in every building, column and block.'

Now passers-by will feel it in the mist as they walk by the fountain.

Rescued From Obscurity

The Water Dome was a decorative centerpiece for the new campus community Wright designed for Florida Southern in the late 1930s at the behest of FSC president Ludd Spivey.

The fountain was one of the later pieces of the collection. It was first filled with water in 1948 but never was able to quite create the dome effect Wright envisioned.

A bit of campus folklore that built up over the years says the fountain had to be shut down because it drenched anyone walking within a few hundred yards of it. But that apparently isn't the case, according to college officials and the architect who researched Water Dome's history.

Instead, the technology of the time just couldn't make Wright's version work.

In 1968, with the construction of the campus' E.T. Roux Library, most of the huge basin was covered in concrete.

Last year, Lakeland's Hollis family, along with other private donors and a $350,000 state grant, funded the Water Dome's $1 million renovation. Architects were charged with rescuing Wright's design from what had become a slab of concrete and three fetid pools used to house koi and, at least in recent years, an alligator.

Workers found the reptile when they began to rip up the concrete last year. No one was injured. Workers also found helpful bits of history, which aided in what Baker calls his 'forensic' approach to recreating Wright's vision.

The original outer wall was still in place, and architects were able to identify the original paint color after analyzing fragments under a microscope. That creamy color now coats the outer wall.

But they also needed to create a sustainable future for the fountain. They did that by replumbing it with much larger piping and setting up an elaborate recirculation system.

When the Water Dome operates, water is sucked down through the new pipe fittings beneath the center of the basin, then piped to a pump house about 100 feet away and rerouted back through the 74 water jets that ring the basin. The fountain will recycle the same 260,000 gallons of water.

Saving Wright's Collection

Since President Anne Kerr took over in 2005, Florida Southern has aggressively sought to burnish the look of the lakeside campus. Gardens and landscaping projects have sprung up everywhere.

That would likely please Wright, who thought of his FSC collection almost as a garden in its own right. He once said the FSC campus is meant as 'an experience of Florida at its floral best.'

But the Wright collection itself has been perhaps the major focus of the campus makeover, with FSC increasingly highlighting both its historical and aesthetic value and warning of its fragility in the face of Florida's heat and humidity.

One of the college's biggest successes came this year, when the World Monuments Fund named FSC's Wright collection one of the world's 100 most endangered monuments, right up there with Machu Picchu and the skyline of St. Petersburg, Russia.

The designation has brought plenty of media attention.

The Getty Foundation is paying for a master plan to preserve and renovate the collection. The college then will use that plan to figure out how best to proceed and pay for keeping the collection viable.

Reporter Billy Townsend can be reached at (863) 284-1409 and wtownsend@tampatrib.com

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