offered to write an introduction for the article, gaining Parker national attention unrivaled by any garnered by his Miami cohort.
Built into a slope overlooking Biscayne Bay, the Royal Road house is composed of two floating slabs of concrete that create a series of interlocking horizontal planes and cantilevered balconies, enclosed by massive blocks of local coral keystone. Huge mahogany persianas (floor-to-ceiling louvered doors) open to blur distinctions between interior and exterior space. Parker oriented the house to catch southeasterly tradewinds off Biscayne Bay at its long edge, and a passive ventilation system encouraged airflow. When Wright visited the house, Parker says, he praised the design – but critiqued the angled terrazzo steps leading up to the main level from the arrival floor.
“When he first came in he looked at the steps, and said ‘Parker, why’d you slope the riser towards you? You could fall and trip coming down,’” he recalls. “I said, ‘Mr. Wright, I’ve been here for 18 months, and during that time nobody has ever tripped.’” On the way down the steps after cocktails, Parker says, Wright pretended to trip. “And he looked at me and had a twinkle in his eye and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a shame if the world’s greatest living architect tripped on some steps you designed, and broke his neck and died?’”

Encouraged by Elizabeth Gordon, Parker designed all of Royal Road’s furniture, light fixtures, rugs and linens. He also did much of the hard labor, digging the foundation and laying the massive stones with his own hands. “Some of them were half as big as my living room,” he says. “Later, I used all the scraps that I had, and I had those by the thousands. I laid it in geometric patterns. By the way, Mr. Wright was doing geometric patterns in his stonework, and I did that on Royal Road and I didn’t even know about Wright’s.”

House Beautiful went on to feature two more of Parker’s designs as Pace Setters, and he and Gordon, both passionately devoted to promoting humanistic design, became lifelong friends. Parker approvingly recalls Gordon’s campaign against Mies van der Rohe on the grounds that his residential work (notably the Farnsworth House) was unlivable. “That brought in the wrath of the architectural fraternity all over the world,” Parker says. “And she didn’t back up one inch. She was feisty, but she was also correct.”

As Parker’s reputation grew during the ’50s and ’60s, he designed grand homes for wealthy clients outside of Florida, including a house for Robert Wood Johnson II, president of Johnson & Johnson, in Princeton, New Jersey. He also designed a Racine, Wisconsin, house for Samuel Curtis Johnson, Jr. (no relation to Robert Wood Johnson), whose father had given Frank Lloyd Wright one of his most important commissions, the S.C. Johnson Wax headquarters, in the 1930s. “He was as close as you could get to Wright without being imitative,” Hochstim says. “None of his houses look like Wright’s houses, but they have the principles behind them. And Al really did a better job at working with the Florida climate.”

Parker estimates that he designed more than 6,000 buildings over the course of his career — 4,000 alone in a low-priced Miami housing development called Essex Village. He approached these modest houses with the same care he took with high-end projects. “I’d do the drawings, and [the developer] would approve them, and then he’d give me a whole block or two blocks of lots, and I’d come along and I’d site-plan all the houses so they’d pick up the prevailing breezes,” he says. He receives appreciative letters from Essex Village homeowners to this day.

He emphasizes, too, that he was not solely a residential architect. “I did banks, office buildings, churches, schools, shopping centers, you name it,” he says. Notable buildings still in existence include Maximo Presbyterian Church in St. Petersburg, Florida (c. 1975), an ark-like shingled form; Hope Lutheran Church on Miami’s Bird Road (1963), which incorporates a cross motif into the structure; the Flagler Federal Savings building, a ten-story marble-clad office building in downtown Miami (1960); the Miami Times building (1970), which resembles a concrete Shinto temple; and Miamarina (c. 1968–70), a downtown marina paired with an octagonal restaurant (now occupied by a Hard Rock Café).

But it is Parker’s residential work that still turns heads. Many of his masterworks have been demolished, notably the Mass house