Interview

[Anne-Marie]

Max, you had the extraordinary opportunity to grow up in a Gene Leedy designed home, and you spent much of your childhood around other buildings and structures that Gene had designed. He has been teaching you how to be an architect from your earliest days. Can you share a little bit about what you learned from Gene early on?

[Max]

I think you’re right. I mean, I was getting this architectural education without even knowing. I had the good fortune of spending a lot of time in this house. Because Gene’s family and our family were close friends. And I remember as a kid being over here, and this house seemed enormous to me. And this is a small house, right? I mean that it lives big, but it’s a small house. But that sense of scale and perspective from a three-year-old or four-year-old or five-year-old is, it’s wild. I think of all of Gene’s projects, these little homes, especially this home here, it’s just got the best human scale, it really does.

[Anne-Marie]

What’s your earliest memory of this space? Or is there a particular moment or corner or vision you have in your head?

[Max]

I think my first memory here is actually in the courtyard. I remember those courtyard pavers and the walls and the concrete and the grass growing between them, you know, that was my memory. And that was normal, this house was not abnormal to me. And growing up in Winter Haven, where Gene Leedy designed damn near the entire town, right? I mean, his architecture was normal. And you know, it wasn’t extraordinary because I didn’t have anything to reference it, right. Growing up in Winter Haven, being surrounded by just quality architecture not even recognizing it until you kind of moved away, you know, was my experience.

[Anne-Marie]

Share some thoughts about what you mean, it was just there, it was ever present.

[Max]

I mean, I’ve got all these memories, you know, growing up from you know, even beyond a three year- old, four-year-old, five-year-old perspective. I became best friends with Gene’s son Ingram into junior high, high school and college. So I spent a lot of time over here at different phases of my life. But I remember in fifth grade and sixth grade we were computer programming, you know, in that room over there, all through the night coding, just those nooks and crannies and built in shelves and drawers and this and that. The house was designed almost like a boat. You know what I mean, everything had its purpose. Every space had to be used to the max because it was so small. But yet it felt so big. And to me the lesson there is that you can live very well in a small amount of space that’s designed right. And in this house, particularly the lessons are these courtyards. These courtyards, I think Gene coined it as wide open privacy, right? He walked around naked all the time. But you felt secure, even though you have walls of glass, because of those courtyard walls.

[Anne-Marie]

What about the house you grew up in?

[Max]

Now the house I grew up in, it was enormous. Even by adult standards, it’s enormous. As Gene’s career evolved he was always wanting to experiment with bolder materials that could span longer. So we got into these prefabricated, prestressed concrete double "T"s that could span 60-70 feet. So the house I grew up in was that three story courtyard house, and it had an exposed block like you see here, walls of glass, like you see here, but just that a totally different scale. And it was that when he switched to concrete, as the structural system for the house instead of wood, which is what this is, the scale jumped tremendously. I said before, I think this house has a much more human scale to it. And the house that I grew up in, even though it was, you know, a pretty big size, it had those nooks and crannies that you’re referencing.

[Anne-Marie]

You and I have talked quite a bit about the intimacy and monumentality, that paradox that’s often in great design, that it can have this monumental feel, it can feel very grand, but it is human scaled and it has these moments of intimacy. How did Gene find those moments, or design those moments of intimacy that you as a small child could find and it wasn’t daunting? The house was large, but there was a place for you in it. It’s those nooks and crannies, right?

[Max]

So even though we had this robust structural system, he would always offset the materials. Even in this house, he might offset where a wood frame of a door meets a wall–there’s a little reveal, a little offset. That still happens in the larger homes, but it might be a foot offset between one structural member and the other with a piece of glass. And that’s where I remember as a kid, just kind of sitting in these nooks and crannies, looking out of glass, seeing a wasp nest go through all of its phases, you know what I mean? I think people would come to that house and just think of it initially as a very cold house. But it wasn’t, it was very warm because of that sense of scale that he had.

[Anne-Marie]

And the materials palette–is there a project that you’ve done that you feel is most informed by the lessons of Leedy?

[Max]

Rock House. Yeah, that was the house that I designed and build for my family in Coconut Grove in 2004. And it’s the structural expression of that house that is directly from growing up in a Gene Leedy house with that structural expression, that clarity of purpose of the architecture. And you’ll clearly see that in the Rock House. It was this exposed structural system. I used steel, not concrete. But all those lessons were powerful, and they carried through in the Rock House.

[Anne-Marie]

And what about your kids’ experience growing up in the Rock House?

[Max]

You know, we don’t have the house now. We moved on. We went to Colorado for a few years; Now we’re back in Florida. But I’m sure for my kids, you know, they’ve discussed that they have their own little nooks and crannies and their own little memories. And I think it’s that upstairs deck, you know, that the Rock House was kind of floating in the treetops, with its outdoor deck. But I think as time goes by, and memories kind of swirl around, they’re interesting. I really want to hear from them more about what the most profound little spaces were for them.

[Anne-Marie]

There’s such a great humanism to your architecture, your sensibility and to Gene’s. And being surrounded by some of his books here, it is deeply politically engaged–engaged in sort of the history of humanity. I mean, the books reveal the sort of social dimension of architecture and the sort of, it’s not just about shaping space, it’s really about how do human beings want to live in the world? How do we want to organize ourselves? How do we want to interact with each other? Can you talk a little bit about your practice, what’s important to you about why architecture matters?

[Max]

You know, architecture is front and center in everybody’s life, whether they like it or not, and whether they recognize it or not. But well designed, well thought out spaces can change your mood, it can change your health, it can change your life. I had the good fortune to just absorb these types of spaces and the influences of architecture, and how it can affect other people’s lives. And most of what we do is residential, not all, but most of it. And I get a lot of pleasure, just kind of through the design process of seeing how families that are going to live in those homes, you know, they don’t know what’s coming a lot of times. You can have two floor plans that look identical, but when you layer it in with a thoughtful process of where the light is coming from, and where you can have cross-ventilation and all these other considerations, you know, I think it’s rewarding. That’s one of the most rewarding parts about what we do, is we’re creating homes.

[Anne-Marie]

As all the houses on the street were homes for families and meant to grow as families grow. You acquired this house in a quite different stage, and you knew the house very well from growing up. But what did you learn, maybe structurally, because that’s something you weren’t paying attention to as a kid, in the process of rehabbing the house? What did you learn about how Leedy designed through that process?

[Max]

What did I learn from restoring this house? Just the simplicity. The simplicity of the house, it has a structure that’s very obvious. And he painted it white, to make sure everybody knew that the structural system is different from the enclosure system, which is mostly glass and a little bit of block. So he kind of separated those two from each other. And in doing so, it really just emphasizes how this is a work of architecture, right? I mean, the art in this house is just the spatial sequence. From inside to out, how this concrete wall here behind you just flows from inside out, that pulls you outside. The house was in bad shape when we started to restore it. And you know, Gene was getting along in years when he passed away. And some of the upkeep was probably deferred, let’s say. But then when Hurricane Irma hit, that really was a defining moment for this house. You know, the eye passed directly over this house. And I came over the next morning. And I wasn’t sure what I was going to find here. Thankfully, I found Gene sitting in his Eames Chair smoking a cigar and he was fine–slept through the whole thing. But outside it was mayhem. A lot of concrete block walls collapsed, every single oak tree came down. It was a mess.

[Anne-Marie]

See, so you talked about Leedy discovering new materials, these long spans, those trusses? Talk about things you get really excited about and how a new technology or a new material or a new application of something has altered your practice throughout. Was there a moment where this sort of thing that wasn’t possible before that’s now possible and sort of transformed the way you thought about your design?

[Max]

That's a tricky one, you know, because we want to be grounded in the lessons of this generation of modernism, right? And modernism is not a style, right? It's an approach to life and it's an approach to problem-solving and all that. So, you know, I like to think that I take that rigor into every single project that we approach. But it comes back to that clarity of purpose and just being authentic. We're not trying to create something that we have to hide all the structure with, we want to expose it, and we want to celebrate it. As far as new materials, we want to be sustainable, we want to choose the right materials that kind of recognize the impact that buildings and houses have on our planet. It's big, you know, 40% of carbon emissions are from buildings, right? So architects have a role to play in the solution. And it's not all, you know, bells and whistles like solar panels and gizmos like that. I think the root is in the passive design of the house. I think that, especially in Florida, you have to have houses that have deep overhangs and shade the glass and cross ventilation and daylighting–those are the easy things, you know, you should be doing those things before you do all this other stuff to make a home sustainable.

[Anne-Marie]

I'm very interested in the indigenous origins of modernism, especially the passive systems and these sort of lessons that kind of site visits with specificity. Can you talk a little bit about how you approach a site? What’s your process in terms of what you might employ when you encounter a site? As you said, the bells and whistles may come later, but what’s the structure, the clarity, the purpose for that site? And employing light, wind, sun, air, all of it. Talk a little bit about how you engage with the site in the beginning?

[Max]

Sure, our architecture is very site driven and climate driven, right. And we try not to go in with a style in mind or look in mind, you know, we explore what the site has to offer–the views, or privacy or sun orientation, all that stuff. And in the from God-knows-where, let’s use what we have here. That’s what grounds architecture to a place. And I think that I really strive, you know, to use those kinds of materials, local materials in all of our projects. Because then it’s very apparent that “Oh, that project belongs in that place.”

[Anne-Marie]

Yes. And eliminates the shipping of heavy materials.

[Max]

And that too, yeah. To me, it’s like, Evian water is nice. But why do you want to have water that’s been shipped in a container ship for six months across the ocean... But, you know, a nice filter on some local tap water can go a long way.

[Anne-Marie]

Absolutely. I wanted to go back a little bit. The geology of this fragile peninsula that we’re on is so extraordinary in terms of, as you just talked a little bit about, how does [your work] even within the state and your work across the state shift? I mean, we have so many wonderful micro-climates, and these bands of the things that only happen in this one moment. Can you talk a little bit about–it’s not just Florida design for you? I mean, it can be very specific to a region. Do you have an example of a project that you really sort of got into the local geology, history, geological history of the site that really expresses itself in the home?

[Max]

Probably a house we did in the Florida Keys. I would say one of our most fragile ecosystems in Florida is the Florida Keys. But we worked on a project there that was kind of straddling this hardwood hammock, and this kind of rocky shoreline. And, for me, that was a very fun process of design, cool things happened. And that’s where the aesthetic of the house usually starts to evolve and appear. In Florida and in the tropics and subtropics, you know, I think that there’s an advantage we have because we need those big overhangs and those shaded places. And that can create a lot of depth to the architecture. So I think some of the more fascinating architecture you see is in the tropics and subtropics.

[Anne-Marie]

In the shadow play that is so obvious in your work, and others in the Sarasota School, that the sort of collateral benefit of that really creates dramatic moments. You talked a little bit about the materials and sustainability. And it’s, as you said, it’s not just about solar panels, but I think we’re more cognizant of supply chains and where things come from and where materials come from, and, you know, all tied back to labor. And again, I’m going back to Gene, and I’m looking at his books and clearly he would have been, and was deeply concerned about labor rights, workers’ rights, sort of equity along the way. Do you want to talk a little bit about your practice in

terms of your relationship to people and materials; a larger sense of how to practice well in the world?

[Max]

I think when you view our work, you see a lot of attention that we give to using local materials. I love using natural materials, and in Florida especially we have some great stone and rock. In the Florida Keys you have keystone with all the fossils in it, brain coral, star coral, it’s awesome. You move up the coast a little bit and you have, at least in South Florida, you have a rock called oolite–it’s oolitic limestone, and it’s a great rock. You move further up the coast, you get cap rock, you go up to Jacksonville, you get coquina rock. And I think that instead of importing all these materials to get into that very site specific response. Because one half of the house was very oriented towards the forest, and took in cues of the forest and used more wood on that side. And then on the other side of the house, it was all about the Atlantic Ocean and the views and the coral reef that it sits on. So for sure we use the keystone fossilized reef material in building the house. So I think that’s one example of how you can get into the geology of the site and have it inform the architecture. But here we are 130 feet higher– this is the ridge of Florida here in Winter Haven. Whole different types of considerations, right? Primarily in the way we do foundations, you don’t have to worry about sea level rises as much here, at least not anytime soon.

[Anne-Marie]

Architecture deals with the ground plane, most of the time, or starts there. You’re a scuba diver, and you’re a pilot. So you have the opportunity to sort of approach this peninsula from a variety of different perspectives. How has beginning to understand the state, or the land and the water, the sort of whole environment shifted with what you’ve learned flying over things and sort of understanding how the built environment has maybe encroached on other lands? What have you learned through your different perspective?

[Max]

You know, Florida just seems so crowded, right? I mean, just for everybody it just seems so crowded. But when you go flying up there, there’s a lot of land still, you know, it’s just a whole different perspective of how you sense how densely populated the state is when you’re looking down from above. As for scuba diving, underneath, below. I wish I had a better answer. Because a lot of times it’s kind of sad going scuba diving now in Florida. I hate saying that, but the reefs are not looking good. You know, there’s all that coral bleaching and the reefs are dying. And you know, there’s some wake up calls there, but there’s still a lot to explore, a lot to see. But I don’t think any scuba diver you ask that dives the coral reefs will come away saying “Oh, they look great.” They don’t.

[Anne-Marie]

Going back to Leedy’s library, there’s so many wonderful 60-70s, early 80s sort of environmental texts here of this crisis moment, or certainly, we have not left that crisis moment. It’s just been exacerbated. Can you talk a little bit about Drexel Avenue and why this is important? What’s happened here?

[Max]

What happened on Drexel Avenue? That sounds like a book, right? You know, if you ask the neighbors on Drexel Avenue, they say it’s a lifestyle, not a place. And there’s something to that. And it’s fascinating. There’s 10 homes that Gene Leedy designed here in ‘56 and ‘57. There were supposed to be 200 or 300 more. This was supposed to be the largest collection of modernist homes on the eastern seaboard. But apparently, there’s a little bit of a recession that happened when these were coming online and the builder stopped at 10. Now, mind you, these houses were $16,000, back in 1956. And there’s a different version that was $16,800. I don’t know yet what you got for that extra $800. But I will tell you this, that you got the house, you got the land, I mean, it was... it was moving ready. But that was 65 years ago. And over time, each of those 10 houses have evolved, they’ve evolved uniquely to the goings on of the families or the occupants that were inside them. And that’s the powerful lesson for these Drexel Avenue homes. They’re also called the Craney spec houses. It’s kind of these competing terms for them. Craney spec houses, that was the developer that did these Craney spec homes, which is now on the Historic Register as a district. But what happened on Drexel 65 years ago, 10 homes were built here. And over time, they each kind of got their own personality. And as far as neighbors go, everybody was, you know, very eager to see what’s behind the walls of the next person’s house. And that curiosity, that intrigue, I think led to a lot of cocktail parties. A lot of neighbors are really getting to know each other, caring about each other. So it’s always been a very social street here on Drexel Avenue.

[Anne-Marie]

I liked that sense of mystery actually created a community. It’s sort of ironic, but a beautiful way for that to unfold, which is another great lesson for you today in terms of how to create a community. I’m very interested in similar kinds of models today. What are the lessons that we can learn from what Leedy did here? What would you add to it? What’s missing?

[Max]

I think, you know, it is the flexibility.

[Anne-Marie]

That’s the other thing that I wanted to have you talk about is that he really understood family dynamics and the flexibility and the modularity. Can you talk a little bit about that as well?

[Max]

Yeah, so this house was designed on a four foot module, right. He would take his drafting board and put out a big piece of paper, and the first thing he would do was draw a grid of four feet. And then he would overlay a structural system on that. In this house it’s every 16 feet. So every four modules, there’s a column, and that are these white columns that are all around us. And then he would align the walls and the perimeter to that as well. And then the roofing would fit within that module. The wood cladding for interior and exterior fit within that module–it is a very efficient way to build. But it was also a very efficient way to expand too. So this house started off at 1100 square feet, and over time with a growing family, the house could kind of grow as well. And he was, you know, very... he was very adherent. He was very strict about using that module to inform how he would expand. So in this house, which saw several children and grandchildren and weddings and divorces and all kinds of things that happened in the normal American family, the house kind of evolved with that. So I think it’s now up to 1400, 1500 square feet, which is not big by American standards of houses.

[Anne-Marie]

It feels, as we’ve discussed, so much larger. The wild courtyard really feels like a palatial villa in the countryside. In fact, it’s a sort of suburban home in a very defined space, but it has a sense of, I think, the continuous flow throughout–you never get caught somewhere, you never get stuck. There’s sort of this endless movement that can happen in flow. That’s really very powerful. In discussing the sort of passive energy opportunities, this house, part of the intimacy/monumentality, that sort of paradox that’s embedded here has to do with this sort of flexibility of spaces with the sliding doors and opening and closing, you can constantly reshape, re-frame space and allow the entire home to function as a sort of machine to modulate the environment. Can you talk a little bit about how Leedy designed that and how you use those principles in your work?

[Max]

So this house was built before air conditioning, so it had to breathe, right, you had to have cross ventilation. When air conditioning slowly caught on the house did start to incorporate it, but it’s kind of more fun to pretend there’s no AC here and open those sliders all the time. These are the first sliding glass doors in Central Florida. So there’s a nice little asterisk that kind of comes with this house. So it was very progressive–it was radical at the time to have these moving walls of glass, right? By today’s standards, though, you’re not allowed to use this much glass in a home. The energy codes have kind of kicked in where they don’t want to see that much glass, which is kind of the... it’s a hard part because we want to encourage people to have a lot of glass and a lot of cross ventilation. But it is the glass that’s the secret for having such a small footprint. It feels like it’s a much larger house and much more spacious. You know, these are, these are the original sliders. You know, I think a few panes of glass might have been replaced over time. I remember one time when his son, Ingram, accidentally kicked one and it shattered. That was exciting. There was some profanity, too, I think I remember that. But yeah, it’s fun to just open up all of the sliding glass doors in here and let the air move through the house.

The Gene Leedy influence upon Max Strang has indeed been profound. Strang’s firm, internationally recognized for its sustainable mindset, carries on the critical regional modernist ethos characteristic of the Sarasota School architects. Upon Gene’s passing, Max spearheaded the rehabilitation of the home as supporters rallied for the creation of a new National Historic District focused on this radical new neighborhood. With the Gene Leedy house as the heart and soul of this district, the home is now poised to influence new generations with its impactful lessons.