Notes from the Horizon

The Land

One Hundred Twenty-Five Blocks a Day

Frank Lloyd Wright wanted his Lakeland campus built out of its own ground, and the ground was a fertilized orange grove that would not make a block

On May 8, 1938, at nearly seventy-one years of age, Frank Lloyd Wright walked onto the Florida Southern College campus in Lakeland for the first time. Seven buildings stood on the property. The rest of it was a gently rolling eighty-foot hill covered in citrus trees, sloping down to Lake Hollingsworth, a nearly circular lake formed by a sinkhole. The college had bought the sixty-seven-acre defunct grove to serve as its campus. Wright remarked that he could envision buildings on this landscape that would grow "out of the ground and into the light – a Child of the Sun." The man who got him there was Ludd Spivey, president of the college since 1925, whose school had lost the majority of its enrollment at the outbreak of the Great Depression. In a telegram the college dates to January 1938, Spivey asked Wright for a conference to discuss the construction of a great education temple in Florida, and told the architect to wire back collect.

Horizon Marine  ·  October 2, 2026

Continue reading →