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