Rollins College: Exemplar of the American Renaissance

       Richard Kiehnel completed the Rollins campus plan in 1927.  The library, set to be a commanding 29-story structure, was the centerpiece.  Set at the terminus of a central axis that bisected a linear green and a common lawn, the dominant structure slated to be the tallest building in Florida paid homage to the University of Virginia and its founder, Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson built an “academic village” that placed the Rotunda, a half-size adaptation of the Pantheon housing the library, at the terminus of a linear lawn.  The rounded cranium housed the “brain” of the University, and it faced an unbounded horizon to symbolize the flow of knowledge into the young Republic. Jefferson envisioned a new kind of university dedicated to educating leaders in practical affairs and, a century later, his iconic hand directed Hamilton Holt.   

      Kiehnel grouped 29 structures to form a neo-Renaissance academic village.  Given the climate, openness and connection were keys.  Loggias and covered walkways linked the campus, while buildings were set on quadrangles and small courtyards to capture breezes and foster air circulation. “Breezy and cool” was how Holt described the scheme to create the first “open-air college” in the United States.

        The library was never built to its outsized specifications.  In fact, funding for

Mills Library was not secured until 1949, the year Holt retired. Designed by James Gamble Rogers II, the two-story steel framed stucco had a commanding arched entryway.  From its steps, one could glean a picturesque view that extended into Winter Park, as the oaks framing Interlachen Avenue directed the eye to the horizon.  This vista was also the route students took to complete their graduation ceremony. They marched across Mills Lawn to the Congregational Church on Interlachen, where they were introduced to the community as citizens ready for service. 

Rollins Graduation ca 1932

      The campus showpiece, Knowles Memorial Chapel and the Annie Russell Theater, was completed in 1932.  The Rolyat set the standard.  The buildings framed a cloistered patio garden centered on a Spanish tiled fountain circled by inlaid cypress.  Kiehnel designed the Annie Russell, while Ralph Cram, a noted ecclesiastical architect, designed Knowles Chapel.  The chapel reflected 17^th Century Spanish architecture, a period when Renaissance fashion transitioned to more classical forms.  The campanile, modeled after the Toledo Cathedral, towered over the campus.  Above the chapel’s entrance a carved stone tympanum depicted Spanish conquistadors planting the first cross in American soil, a reminder that Florida’s unique history was embedded in the college’s calling to prepare young minds for the future.

Knowles Chapel Bell Tower

       The campus was built largely in accordance with Kiehnel’s plan, but it had, from a modern perspective, a glaring omission—there were no parking lots.  In 1927 the automobile was an option, but once it became a necessity the campus’s pedestrian orientation suffered.  The widening and realignment of Fairbanks Avenue severed the central axis.  Graduation ceremonies were confined to campus and parking lots soon covered sites designated for open space.  In the 1990s road rage entered the picture, as Central Florida suffered the nation’s highest pedestrian death rate.

       Looking to the past for inspiration, the college and Winter Park championed a pedestrian-oriented urbanism patterned on the American Renaissance.  In 1997 Dover-Kohl redesigned Park Avenue.  Sidewalks were widened for outdoor dining, vehicular travel lanes were narrowed and bricked, and a prescription was provided for designing buildings based on the principles of traditional civic art.  In 2002, Rollins College commissioned Chael Cooper & Associates, in affiliation with Dover Kohl, to design the McKean Gateway and the Rinker Admissions Building on Fairbanks Avenue.  Taken together they established a definitive terminus and signified the willingness of both college and city officials to restore a walkable, pedestrian-centric community.  In 2014 a gateway was built at the head of a new walkway that bifurcated the linear green centered on Mills Library.  The Harvard Gates inspired architect John Cunningham’s concept for this signature piece, which marked the reestablishment of the historic central axis.

Rollins Gateway 

       The last three presidents of Rollins, Thaddeus Seymour, Rita Bornstein, and Lewis Duncan, labored to create the intimate sense of place Hamilton Holt revered.  Their efforts not only produced the most beautiful campus in the nation, they restored a vision grounded in the iconic ambitions of American higher education.   

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Rollins College: The Renaissance Origins of the Most Beautiful Campus in America

     In August 2015, Princeton Review named Rollins College the most beautiful campus in the nation.  The decision was based on survey results, but the iconic beauty of Florida’s oldest college is rooted in history.  Its harmonious blend of Mediterranean Revival Architecture, intimate greens and plazas, scenic vistas, covered walkways, and oak-shaded paths is an exemplar of the American Renaissance, a generational effort to mold an unparalleled prosperity into a new urban civilization. The movement began in the 1880s and disappeared after 1930, “the last full flourish of the Renaissance that begun in Italy in the 15^th Century,” Henry Hope Reed writes.http://www.amazon.com/The-Architecture-Humanism-History-Classical/dp/0393730352 

       New England Congregationalists founded Rollins in 1885 and sited it on Lake Virginia in Winter Park, which was modeled on Riverside, Illinois, Frederick Law Olmsted’s prototype suburb.  Olmsted set a precedent for the American Renaissance by employing “the arts of civilization” to channel the “flood” of urbanization into humane form.  Like Riverside, Winter Park was centered on a rail station in a park and designed to the pedestrian scale.  Its 1883 town plan, which had concentric circles denoting five-minute walks radiating from the train station, ensured easy access to nature and transportation.  Rollins occupied the downtown’s southern terminus and, like Florida, it developed in unique fashion.     

     When the college was founded Florida was a backwater, the least populated state east of the Mississippi River.  A decade later, Henry Flagler had energized Florida’s dormant economy by building a series of luxury hotels in conjunction with his new rail line.  Eastern elites flocked to architectural marvels set in stunning subtropical settings.  The Royal Poinciana Hotel in Palm Beach, the world’s largest wooden structure, was Flagler’s crown jewel and a precursor of Florida’s future.

      In the 1920s tourism became a staple of the first consumer economy, and Florida attracted the greatest investment in real estate capital in history. “The story of Florida is a story of adventure romance written through a long history—four centuries...The early search was for the Fountain of Youth and for gold, and the modern one is not essentially different,” John Nolen noted at a 1925 city planning conference. Flimflam and opportunism was rampant, but there was also significant investment. Villages turned into cities, and by decade’s end Florida was the first former Confederate state to have a majority of its population classified as urban.  Nolen, an Olmsted disciple, had multiple commissions in the state he called, “the nation’s great laboratory of city planning.”  The aesthetic competence that imbued Nolen’s new town of Venice marked the zenith of the American Renaissance.  Classical forms and a sophisticated park system placed recreation and leisure—the essence of tourism—on a higher plane.  An amphitheater adorning a beachfront park epitomized the neo-Renaissance plan’s essence—classical motifs celebrated nature and the arts to elevate the modern mind. 

Note amphitheater adjacent to the parkway terminating at the Gulf

          Hamilton Holt, the new president of Rollins, also adhered to this logic. A confidant of Nolen, the longtime editor of The Independent accepted the position “because Florida is the one state…where the spirit of progress most prevails and where results follow quickest from effort.” A consummate reformer, Holt wanted to break the staid academic formula by marrying pragmatism and the liberal arts.  He would direct Rollins, he wrote Nolen, on an “adventure in common sense education.”

       Holt’s first priority was to commission a plan for the 70-acre campus. An American Riviera was arising in Florida and the accomplishments of Rollins alumni George Merrick, the developer of Coral Gables, inspired Holt.  The new Miami suburb had drawn national attention for its unmatched assemblage of Mediterranean Revival architecture.  With its open courtyards, tiled roofs, stucco exteriors, high ceilings, and arched windows and doorways, this style combined practicality and aesthetics to meet the challenge of Florida’s hot, humid climate, Merrick also donated a 600-acre site for a private university in 1925, the year Holt came to Rollins.  

         By 1926 Holt had studied a series of Mediterranean Revival projects in Miami and St. Petersburg.  He chose the Rolyat Hotel as a model for Rollins.  Richard Kiehnel, a talented architect who introduced Mediterranean Revival to Florida, designed the St. Petersburg hotel (it was turned into a private school after the real estate market crashed in 1926).  Inspired by a medieval Spanish monastery, Kiehnel arranged a series of buildings around a large central plaza.  A dominating tower based on Seville’s Torre Del Oro was the focal point, an emphatic statement Holt wanted to replicate.

Rolyat Hotel ca 1925

My next blog will analyze the Plan for Rollins.  On the relationship between Holt and Nolen see

John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner, http://lalh.org/john-nolen-landscape-architect/

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