go out through concealed orifices in the roof.” Parker says he will furnish and decorate the one-bedroom house entirely with his own designs, including a new dining table built of four-inch-thick Honduran mahogany left over from a long-ago project.

By many accounts, Parker, who was born in Boston in 1916 and moved to Miami at age eight, is the greatest architect Florida has produced. Among the group of “tropical modernists” working in South Florida in the years following World War II, he was the major figure, locally rooted but nationally known. He was inspired by the ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright to produce original buildings that responded with sensitivity to the subtropical climate, the local landscape, new household technologies and shifting social patterns that resulted in new ways of arranging domestic space, such as open floor plans and kitchens. Today, his residential work still looks fresh, modern and perfectly adapted to its settings, with open plans, lots of natural ventilation and light and evocative materials like mahogany and coral keystone. No less an authority than Wright himself praised his work: in an article about Parker’s Royal Road House in House Beautiful magazine in 1954, Wright declared, “This Florida house aims at the highest goal to which architecture may aspire: organic architecture.”