Rhode Island’s Architect Steps Away— A Global Impact
Monday, June 20, 2022
"House on the Rocks, for Livia Campanella" a design by St. Florian that seems to weave his Italian influence with a coastal expression. PHOTO: GoLocal
In his 20s, he won global competitions against some of the world’s most noted architects. In his 70s and 80s, he was designing some of the biggest ideas in the world.
The most important work he created was the monument for the greatest generation — the World War II Memorial in Washington. DC. Brilliant in size and scope, it is the perfect piece of the puzzle in one of the important public spaces in America.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTIn a two-hour interview with St. Florian, he discussed a professional career that has traversed the world and changed perceptions. St. Florian is a complicated global thinker, who is as charming and understated as he is accomplished.
Great Challenge and Conflict
“Friedrich St. Florian is the most important Rhode Island architect of the second half of the 20th Century. As a designer, artist, educator, cultural force, competition entrant, and citizen, St. Florian’s work has linked the Rhode Island School of Design and the City of Providence with the architectural avant-garde of Europe and beyond,” said Will Morgan, GoLocal’s architecture critic and author of 15 books.
Professor Nicolaus Mills of Sarah Lawrence University and the author of “Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial,” told GoLocal in a phone interview that St. Florian’s greatest accomplishment was also a battle — one that included personal attacks on him and “race-baiting” due to St. Florian's Austrian heritage.
A Rocketing Early Career
St. Florian’s career began in the 1950s and it took off from the beginning. He and Raimund Abraham, a classmate in college at Graz, a 400-year-old university, finished third in one global competition — ahead of Walter Gropius — the German-American architect and founder of the Bauhaus School.
Then, St. Florian and Abraham shocked the architectural world by winning a global competition to design the then-Belgian Congo’s Cultural Center.
The Center was never built as colonialism was unraveling. The country today is the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
"I wanted to come to America. I had such desire to be in America," said St. Florian.
His career continued to reach milestone after milestone. He received a Fulbright Fellowship for graduate school at Columbia University and was later offered a professorship.
From Columbia, it was on to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
Recruited to RISD - Rhode Island's Big Break
RISD had hired Albert Bush-Brown to serve as President and in turn, Bush-Brown went on a hiring spree to elevate the College Hill art school. St. Florian -- and his growing reputation -- was an early target.
While at RISD, St. Florian was given the opportunity to teach in Rome as part of a school program. The Rome experience was critical for many reasons -- it expanded his creative perspective, improved his teaching skills, and, most importantly, he met Livia Campanella. She was a painter and the two married. The couple returned to Rhode Island in 1967.
“As one of a group of Austrian rebels who burst upon the world architecture scene back in the 1960s, St. Florian injected a more adventurous take on design, first in New York, and then at MIT, and finally as a professor, department chair, and dean at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence; he headed up RISD’s presence in Rome. Generations of architects and other designers were taught and mentored by St. Florian, an influence that spreads far beyond Providence and Italy,” said Morgan.
For a time, St. Florian taught at MIT. This period was far more theoretical. He designed vertically.
He used lasers at MIT to shape rooms with designs and concepts forecasting the future of design and living. His theoretical period was far, far away from the designs of the 1950s that first launched his career, but it was the expression of a new level of thinking for St. Florian. This led him to greater and greater positions in academia becoming chair of the Arch of Architecture Department at RISD and later provost.
In the early 1990s, he began to return to commercial work. It ranged from corporate work to international competitions to the Skybridge across Providence -- the great element of the Providence Place Mall design.
World War II Memorial - a Tribute to "The Greatest Generation"
Mills describes St. Florian in his WW II Memorial book, "In an era when we think of architects as master builders with enormous egos, St. Florian is the opposite -- a quietly confident man who does not seek out the limelight and who speaks admiringly of the architects, classical and contemporary, who have influenced him."
For St. Florian, the early competitions in his career gave him the confidence and the experience to go after arguably the greatest architectural prize of the century.
"When I started to think about the design, I realized the big problem with the site was that it was between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. And the view between those two icons cannot be intercepted," said St. Florian.
"So for me, even before I thought about the architecture aspect of what is a memorial, it was an urban design issue. So I made diagrams and [Gian Lorenzo] Bernini had similar issues at St. Peter's," said St. Florian.
At the time he was working through the challenges of developing his concepts for one of America's most significant memorials, he was practicing from his office in downtown Providence. located at 112 Union Street -- the old Telephone Building -- now converted to apartments.
"We were kicked out when they renovated the building," St. Florian.
St. Florian said, "Both the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument were on hills, artificial hills and that is when I had the idea of lowering the level of the piazza [of the World War II]."
St. Florian won the competition for the World War II monument, but then politics and more politics began to interfere. There were complaints about the size and the scope, the columns, the location, petty Washington, D.C. politics and ugly insults due to St. Florian's ethnicity.
"The World War II Memorial on the Mall in Washington is St. Florian’s most abiding monument. Beating out hundreds of contestants in a national competition, this immigrant from a country taken over by Nazi Germany was able to fashion an exceptional, inspirational work of art in a city of major commemorative architecture. As a tribute to 'The Greatest Generation,' St. Florian’s World War II Memorial was not without controversy; it would have been impossible to satisfy all the critics, not to mention the many federal oversight committees and government agencies involved. Yet, St. Florian’s classical landscape of memory is a dignified exercise in the grandest tradition of civic design," said Morgan.
Morgan added, "The success of the World War II Memorial demonstrated the importance of competitions in discovering exceptional talent. Admittedly, competitions are more the norm in Europe (in Finland, for example, all public building designs must be realized by competition)."
"Some of the great monuments of recent world architecture are the result of such contests. And Friedrich St. Florian has been an able and courageous competitor. While knowing about his Washington work, most people may not know that he was a competitor for the Oslo Opera House, the new Helsinki Library, and was a finalist for the revolutionary Paris art museum, the Pompidou Center," added Morgan.
Impact on Providence
"The brilliant and charming Friedrich St.Florian has been a beacon of unique conceptual and built architecture and urban design in big and small projects,” said long-time St. Florian friend and journalist Robert Whitcomb.
His works in Rhode Island and especially in Providence are profound and enduring.
“In Rhode Island, he's well known for his imaginative and enthusiastic role in the renaissance of downtown Providence. Nationally, of course, he's celebrated as the architect of the World War II Memorial in Washington. He has inspired architects around the world, some of whom were his students at the Rhode Island School of Design. All of us who know him well treasure Friedrich for his friendship and as a cultural force,” said Whitcomb, the former head of the Paris desk of the International Herald and GoLocal columnist.
Top real estate executive Sally Lapides, the CEO of Residential Properties, says, “We are blessed to have had decades of Friedrich’s vision and talent everywhere we look in Rhode Island. Its modern beauty blends beautifully with our historic past.”
Residential Properties always markets when a property was "St. Florian designed."
St. Florian designed 91 Prospect Street - one of Providence's most valuable homes. PHOTO: Residential Properties
There were projects that were constructed on grand scales in Providence, like the now-classic Prospect Street mansion.
Morgan said, “St. Florian’s private architectural practice was based in Providence, from where he designed a number of handsome modern houses here and elsewhere in New England. His best-known local work may be the Providence Place Mall, in which St. Florian pulled together a large urban mercantile space within a traditional design that connected with downtown and its past. Yet, his most significant local achievement stems from the famous brainstorming sessions with colleagues William Warner and Irving Haynes, where the three hatched the idea of uncovering the Providence River. In one of the boldest renewal efforts anywhere, this inspirational project initiated the city’s phenomenal Renaissance.”
And, the equally brilliant are spaces that St. Florian designed that just dripped with "cool."
A Total Artist
“Friedrich St. Florian has always been a total artist, in the great tradition of the Italian Renaissance. His sketches and drawings form a remarkable body of work. In some circles, he is known as much for his two-dimensional works as for his realized structures. But St. Florian’s early and famously exhibited work was more than just the explorations of space by a talented designer,” said Morgan.
“There was also a message of social responsibility, and one of the best examples of his understanding of the role of designer as a world citizen and an agent of change is his ”Statue of Liberty Hologram for South Africa,” which was both an anti-Apartheid protest and an expression of America as a beacon of hope,” added Morgan.
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