Perhaps because so much of Parker’s best work — and that of his contemporaries — is threatened with demolition or already gone, a movement is afoot to designate him the leader of a “Coconut Grove school” of architecture, named after the jungly, formerly bohemian Miami neighborhood where many of the era’s most inventive architects lived and designed. But the master himself flatly denies involvement in anything resembling a “school,” calling himself a “lone wolf.” When he talks about his work, he focuses on practical questions, saying that he didn’t give much thought to his hero, Wright, when he was in the thick of designing a house. “I was looking at my site, my materials,” he says, “and I had materials you couldn’t comprehend, because there were riches of materials,” like coral keystone, oolitic limestone and mahogany imported from Central America. “I could bring the environment, the climate in, and add it together to a very nice design, and that’s what Mr. Wright saw and admired.” As for questions of style, Parker simply cites the dictum of another hero, Louis Sullivan: form follows function. “I tell my students at the university, ‘Make it work and make it beautiful,’” he says. “That is what architecture is: practicality and aesthetics.”

Jan Hochstim, a Miami architect, professor of architectural history at the University of Miami and the author of Florida Modern, a book about the state’s postwar residential architects, agrees that the notion of inserting Parker into an organized movement along the lines of the Sarasota school is misguided. “Sarasota had more cohesion, more unified ideas because of [Paul] Rudolph,” he says. “In Miami, we had a series of different approaches. There were some similarities, but the unifying thing was just logical, sensible design based on economy, climate, the social pattern at the time, after the war, and technological changes like concrete.” Hochstim points to the strong contrast between the so-called school’s two leading lights: Parker, a Wrightian who favored organic materials, and Rufus Nims, who worked in a Miesian glass-and-steel mode.

But Hochstim says that there was a somewhat consistent typology to Miami’s mid-century residential architecture, despite differences in style. “They used a lot of pitched roofs, flat floating slabs, louvers and screened enclosures,” he says. And whether they were working in an organic or a minimalist style, all took hold of modernism and made it tropical — a gesture that, in the days before widespread air conditioning, was as much practical as aesthetic.

“It wasn’t a school where everyone sat around and discussed what to do,” says Kenneth Treister, an architect and sculptor half a generation younger than Parker who is also identified with the Coconut Grove group. “But they all did similar things. There were probably six to ten architects that did work similarly and influenced each other, although they would never admit it. And Al Parker was the leader. He really set the tone.”

After graduating from the University of Florida, serving as a naval intelligence officer in World War II and returning to Gainesville to teach, Parker opened a practice in Coconut Grove, steadily working on residential and commercial projects through the early ‘50s. He made a practice of designing, building — sometimes inhabiting — and then selling his houses, which he has continued to the present day; he sold his most recent project, a house in a leafy neighborhood of Gainesville, in 2005. In the early ’50s, his house on Coconut Grove’s Royal Road, while still under construction, caught the eye of Elizabeth Gordon, the influential and controversial editor of House Beautiful magazine, and she selected it as the magazine’s “Pace Setter House” for 1954. Frank Lloyd Wright, stopping by Gordon’s New York office, saw the layout (photographed by Ezra Stoller, who shot a great deal of Parker’s work over the years) and liked the house so much that he Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132