The Master of Coconut Grove
At 91, architect Alfred Browning Parker looks back…and forward

By Juliette Guilbert

Alfred Browning Parker is building himself a house in Gainesville, Florida, at the edge of a pond where alligators lie in wait for unwary egrets. “An alligator will eat the whole egret: the feet, the toes, the bill, feathers, everything,” he says, “and then lay in the sun up there and digest it for about a week. If I see just one egret flying overhead, I think, poor thing, it’s lost its mate. But it still flies with the flock.”

Soon, the egrets will flock over the tenth house Parker has designed and built for himself in the 60-odd years he’s been an architect. As a concession to his advancing age, Parker has taken on an assistant, a student from the architecture program at the University of Florida, where he teaches. But his appetite for designing, and for building his designs with his own hands is undiminished; along with his assistant and some heavy equipment operators, the 91-year-old will take an active part in construction.

“We will form and we will pour, and I’m going to use a lot of precast concrete,” he says, gazing out toward the site a half-mile from the window of the tenth-floor apartment he shares with his wife, Euphrosyne. “I’ve got a ventilation system where the prevailing breezes can come in through the windows and doors, and