Mid-Century style on Florida's Space Coast

Now that the last of the shuttles have been picked apart and dispersed for points elsewhere, and Americans have to hitch a ride beyond the blue, it can be said also that the original dream of a Space Age, which so gripped the nation's psyche during the golden 1950s-60s seems to have run out of fuel here as well.

Once a nexus of launch activity and a parabolic building boom, the Space Coast was arguably a near-perfect time capsule of Mid-Century Modern design. The style of the time was an exuberant explosion of vaulting roof lines, angled plate glass, sine wave arches, boomerangs and atoms.

Florida Memories Collection

Mid-Century Modern. It was streamlined, it was copied, it was a physical manifestation of faith in science and in an unlimited future. It influenced the world, from housing to industrial design. It was the 'American Look,' indigenous as Jazz music and uniquely our own.

 The Space Coast once had the American Look in spades, although little of it has been preserved; there are a few worn details left, but those may well already be on someone's list to 'update'. The great irony is that Mid-Century Modern design has now come full circle.

 Elsewhere in the world, Hipsters snatch up remnants of Atomic Age furnishings, art and clothing. Gen Xers vie for the un-renovated 1950s-'60s homes. Urban explorer websites send pilgrims to Cocoa Beach's unique and once-spectacular Glass Bank. Although dim and crumbling, the 1961 structure is considered vastly more interesting than older, but, yet-another-non-descript Greek Revival buildings in the area.

Conservation groups are vigilant in protecting Mid-Century buildings in California, Washington, Nevada and Oregon; efforts are ramping up in other states as well. Enclaves of the playful, distinctive architecture have proven to be major tourist draws in Phoenix, Arizona and along New Jersey's Wildwoods Shore.
Variations on the Mid-Century style -- Atomic, Vroom, Ray Gun Gothic, DooWop and Googie are increasingly cropping up on our nations' Historic Register. Renovators reap tax breaks and the amount of money for rehab grants is growing.

 In residential housing, today's young architects look at Modernist and Mid-Century style as they lead a backlash against the excesses of the housing bubble, when boom-time contractors raced to pack homes with the most square-footage-under-air in order to qualify for ever-larger construction loans. Critics call those results bland and bloated warrens of rooms, rather than livable spaces.

They suffer from choppy layout, wasted space and wasted materials. Interiors are climate control nightmares, and exteriors a pastiche of illogical roof lines and stuccoed foam gewgaws. Garage Mahalls.

 In a 2006 article The Wall Street Journal noted a rise in 'minimalist' houses, sparing of energy, materials and square footage. The trend has rippled out into commercial custom home design: The National Association of Home Builders' 2012 awards went to models which demonstrated simplicity, cost-effective use of materials and to those which incorporated indoor-outdoor living space. To American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, that would sound quite familiar.

Wright, as always, was ahead of the curve. In the late 1930s, a post-Depression scarcity of building materials (more likely, a dearth of moneyed patrons) prompted him to re-think single family home design. He was among the first to observe that advances in industrial production techniques and in transportation would likely yield a more autonomous working class ready to venture into suburban enclaves to raise families.

Toward that end, Wright designed faster, cheaper, and more comfortable homes. He called his concept Usonian, and these are its basic elements: low-cost building materials; spare roof lines, most of them on a horizontal axis; passive solar heating and cooling attained by extended roof overhangs and covered walkways for shade; clerestory windows and patterned concrete block fenestration for pleasant, indirect interior lighting; strong visual and physical connection between the interior and exterior spaces through glass walls and spacious patios; open floor plans for kitchen and living areas; concrete slab floors and carports. Yes, Frank Lloyd Wright invented carports.

Usonian Basic, Wikimedia Creative Commons

Just as Space Coast high tech began to come into its own, Wright completed his 'Child of the Sun,' a 10-year opus which is the whole of the campus of Florida Southern University in Lakeland (designated earlier this year as a National Historic Landmark by the Park Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior).

 Let's just understate and say Wright was influential in Florida home building in the early '50s. Ever the entrepreneur, Wright reprised his Usonian concept. Essentially, he went into the building supply business, producing the both modest floor plans and a patterned, concrete block-and-rebar system for modular, expandable houses. He envisioned this system would be a hit with the DIY homeowner crowd and assembled on weekends, after barbecue parties.

 Most homeowners, however, passed on it and just hired building contractors to produce similar-looking designs. Wright's original proportions got re-interpreted into standard concrete block sizes. Further, few of the maestro's horizontal roofs ever remained water tight for long, and his glass walls didn't particularly lend themselves to privacy in subdivision settings.

Illustration from a 1952 Sherwin Williams brochure

Nevertheless, most of Wright's 'natural house' concepts formed the basis of Mid-Century housing design.

 Meanwhile, in California, architect John Lautner, with a nod towards Italian Futurist architecture circa World War I, took design off the chain and created motion. He is primarily responsible for the American kitsch known as 'Googie' or 'Ray Gun Gothic', architecture, for upswept roofs, geometric curves and glass, steel and neon Space Age designs.

 Concurrently, designers Charles and Ray Eames revisited and refined Wright's sometimes-chunky and overdecorated lines, consulted Modern art, threw in a little Miro, a little Mondrian, and made use of new technologies in extruded metals and molded plywood. Generally, they set about streamlining American industrial and consumer products from chairs to World's Fairs.  They were highly-influential in the look of Mid-Century interior furnishings.

 Through all this the sleepy little Space Coast built on, a blank slate with a big need. The Town of Cocoa Beach saw a 1000% increase in building permits between 1950 and 1960 to the point where, as noted in City archives, a moratorium on permits was declared in order to 'sort things out'.

Mosquito Beaters archive

 Relatively modest and utilitarian, Space Coast buildings of the time lacked some of the more exuberant excesses of 'Ray Gun Gothic,' but nonetheless represented with sinage of Vanguard rockets and the airborne buttresses of the Starlite Motel.

Low cost houses with the signature overhangs and open plans made best use of sea breezes in the era before central air. Most of the housing design hereabouts was decidedly plebian, but isn't that what Wright would have wanted? And most of those early homes are long gone; such as the subdivisions razed for Launch Complex 39.

If you look closely, though, you can still see vestiges of the Space Coast's contribution to Mid-century American style. One distinctive feature in our area seems to be that actual rocket scientists liked the look of sine waves in their concrete entry canopies. A few of these remain.

Saturn Condo, Cocoa Beach

Cape View Elementary School, Cape Canaveral

Cape Royal Building, Cocoa Beach

What an interesting little Petri dish the Space Coast once was. Most of the Mid-Century buildings here were never surveyed or cataloged.

An apochryphal story, but it is believed the iconic Moonhut sign ended ignobly on a dump.

In 1984 parts of Cape Canaveral Air Force station were added to the National Register of Historic Places, but we locals failed to take a cue from that.

The erosion continues. Little Cape Canaveral bungalows and bits of buildings are going, going, gone, leaving subsequent generations to weigh the history of a seldom-seen audacity of American design against salt-rotted rebar and asbestos-wrapped pipes.

 Fly me to the moon
 And let me play among the stars.
 Let me see what Spring is like, On Jupiter and Mars...