Frank Lloyd Wright's Annie Pfeiffer Chapel for Florida Southern College, Lakeland (1938-41) was built for a client, Ludd M. Spivey, who had studied with modernist theologians at the University of Chicago and as president of Florida Southern had directed it toward an educational program that balanced the natural sciences and study of Christianity in the context of world religions. Spivey asked Wright to design a campus and chapel that would express these ideals. Wright's Pfeiffer Chapel is an essay in modern cantilevered construction of steel-reinforced concrete. Analysis of this daring structural system suggests that it was partly his realization of the principles of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, whose writings Wright admired. For Spivey the chapel was a symbol of religion as a source of democratic values that would resist totalitarian powers. Wright wrote of modern cantilevered construction as a symbol of American democracy. The chapel embodied his aim of regional character rather than uniformity in modern architecture.
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