Photo: Steven Brooke Studios
Carl Abbott
Architecture for Nature
Carl Abbott’s beautiful spaces are a rare and impressive combination of architectural clarity and humanistic warmth — his Architecture has a sense of timelessness.
The exhibition features over a dozen projects that exemplify Abbott’s unique climate and site-based perspective on living in harmony with one’s environment. Using his Bayou Studio as the epicenter of Abbott’s creative inquiry, the exhibition shows how key concepts developed in the experimental atelier space find physical form in his built projects, whether commissioned or conceived with a prescribed program.
Nature is at the heart of Carl Abbott’s creative practice. All of his gestures — however small or grand — exemplify Abbott’s committed ethic and aesthetics, his site-based perspective on living in harmony with one’s environment. While some belief systems posit a “man” v. “nature” sensibility, Abbott’s cosmology understands human beings to be of nature. He thus shapes space, physically and conceptually, to serve nature’s—our—needs, in terms of comfort and shelter, but most importantly, in terms of one’s enrichment and enhancement of life.
About the Exhibition
The exhibition arrays over three areas on the Museum Campus: a site-responsive meditation grove located in the Marcy & Michael Klein Plaza, a spotlight exhibition in the historic portion of the Wendy G. Surkis & Peppi Elona Lobby, and a mini-retrospective in the Claire H. Rusen Gallery.
The Historic Lobby
Extant/Extinct
In the U.S. we tend to think we are progressive if we tear it down and rebuild, it must be better. We don’t hold on to things that are important.
Each of the six gothic-arched niches (that historically contained sculptures prior to their mysterious disappearance in the 1950s) features a single project. These six projects, three of which are extant and three of which have been destroyed, represent masterworks of Abbott’s oeuvre.
The Bayou Studio
The Bayou Studio is both an atelier and an experimental and experiential laboratory space, where Abbott’s designs are conceptualized prior to finding physical form in his built projects. This portion of the exhibition articulates the path these ideas take from conception to creation in his realized, commissioned projects. In addition to serving as a mini-retrospective view of Abbott’s work, visitors will encounter a recreation of The Bayou Camera, an immersive installation uniting light and landscape at the Bayou Studio property. Abbott’s intervention into the structure, opening an east wall as a portal through which to engage with the visually “captured” primeval forest across Whittaker Bayou, allows one to experience a continuously shifting play of light, a key element in Abbott’s design practice.
The Bayou Camera
One of the highlights of The Bayou Studio is a permanent, immersive site-responsive light installation that embodies the notion of the Studio as a dynamic experimental and experiential lab. What might seem at first glance to be a conference room, with a “picture window” and a view, is actually an extraordinary and ever-changing environment that harnesses and captures the shifting light to create a time-based art installation.
The operating concept here is one of a “camera”, literally, a room and the origin of our word for the device that captures our vision as memory.
The Meditation Grove
La Musa Azul
As one enters the Plaza, the eye is drawn toward two “Abbott Blue” walls converging in a portal. These diagonal gestures define the entrance to the site-responsive, interactive installation, La Musa Azul, featuring one of the signature blue hues that has defined Abbott’s creative practice since his youth, where he was captivated by the wild irises and petunias of his Georgia childhood. The sculpture defines Abbott’s intersecting attributes as both a colorist and a landscape designer, and employs his signature diagonal gesture, used as a device to lead both body and vision. Visitors are invited to wander the grove, sit in quiet contemplation or simply marvel at the musa trees (Latin name for the banana genus), and enjoy the shared etymology of “muse”, origin of the word museum—a muse in the grove. Trees have long provided our “first architecture”—providing shelter—and sacred groves throughout time and across cultures have provided a respite from the bustle of our “profane”, workaday lives—much needed during this current time.
About Carl Abbott, FAIA
Heralded as the last member of the famed Sarasota School of Architecture, Carl Abbott was born near Darien, Georgia in 1936 and moved to Ft. Meyers, Florida in 1951. After receiving his BArch cum laude from the University of Florida in Gainesville, he worked in Bert Brosmith’s Sarasota office, then studied at Yale under both Paul Rudolph and Louis Kahn, where he received his MArch in 1962. Abbott is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions and has worked in Hawaii, in New York with I.M. Pei and in London with fellow Yale classmates Lord Richard Rogers and Lord Norman Foster. He has lectured extensively and taught studios at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. His architectural office has been based in Sarasota, Florida for over 50 years. His most recent commission is a residence on Casey Key completed in 2019.