In the 1950s, a group of Miami architects turned the house inside out, embracing the environment with expansive, screened-in living areas, atriums, and louvered walls. The nation’s postwar optimism and enthusiasm for the new concept of leisure time found its maximum expression here in modern tropical homes that had water views or were hidden on jungle-like lots.
“People here were enthusiastic about new architecture,” says architect Rufus Nims, now 90, better known to some as the creator of the modern design for the Howard Johnson restaurants and motor lodges. “They were in a new place and they understood that we could work with them to achieve a better way of living.”
Nims was one of a group of pioneering architects who came together in Miami, including the late Igor Polevitzky, whose Birdcage House featured screens across the entire façade instead of solid walls, and Alfred Browning Parker, whose Pacesetter House introduced the public to Parker’s integration of local stones and wood as well as his intense focus on landscaping.
This new school of Southern architects was guided by the natural heat-busting techniques found in Florida vernacular architecture. “The old Crackers down here knew that if you can get in the breeze and in the shade, you don’t get hot,” Nims explains. “And if you get in the sun and out of the breeze, you don’t get cold. But the idea was to do it better.” With that in mind, Nims and his peers adopted open floor plans and innovations like Le Corbusier’s exterior window shades, used on the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro.
“Nims invented ways of resolving the age-old problem of living in the tropics,” says Allan Shulman, a Miami architect who co-curated a recent show on postwar tropical homes. “He believed that we deserve an appropriate architecture for this very distinctive environment.”
“I think alienation from the environment is a very bad thing,” says Nims, who these days spends most of his time on his own mango tree–shaded patio. “I’ve refused to do houses for people who didn’t care whether they were living here in Florida or in New Jersey.”
