ABOUT
Architecture Sarasota stewards the legacy of the Sarasota School of Architecture and provides a forum for the education, advocacy and celebration of good design in the global built environment.
Architecture Sarasota unites the legacy vision of both SAF and CFAS. We invite you to join Architecture Sarasota as an Inaugural Member, to help launch this new era of the organization.
Architecture Sarasota is located in the restored Scott Building on South Orange Avenue. Between 2014 and 2015, the Center for Architecture Sarasota (one of Architecture Sarasota’s legacy organizations) restored and transformed the building into a museum-quality gallery and a lecture hall with state-of-the-art presentation technologies, as well as a design studio and office space.
In 1959, Clarence Scott commissioned architects William Rupp and Joseph Farrell to design a building that would serve as the new showroom for the Barkus Furniture Company. The building is a one-story commercial structure with a flat roof and open floor plan featuring a precast concrete structural system with terrazzo floors and exposed masonry, supports, and columns.
After the Barkus Furniture Company closed, the building was purchased by Sarasota County in 1999 and converted into a print shop. The building had fallen into disrepair when the newly-founded Center for Architecture Sarasota approached the county in 2013 with the idea of turning it into a usable gallery space. The county agreed and, with funding from major donor and architecture enthusiast Nathalie McCulloch, the renovation began. The renovated Scott Building reopened as the McCulloch Pavilion in October 2015.
Leadership at the Center for Architecture Sarasota partnered with the University of Florida School of Architecture, raised funds and underwent a sensitive adaptive reuse of the building led by Guy Peterson, FAIA, in consultation with Joseph Farrell.
THE ARCHITECTS
William Rupp and Joseph Farrell received Bachelor’s degrees in Architecture from the University of Florida and began their careers as assistant architects to Paul Rudolph. In 1959, Rupp and Farrell left Rudolph’s office and started a practice together as associated architects. Although their collaborative practice only lasted a little over two years, they earned national recognition and awards for projects such as the Uhr Residence-Studio in Sarasota and the Caladesi National Bank in Dunedin.
Joseph Farrell relocated to Hawaii in 1961 and spent most of his career designing buildings around the Pacific, receiving numerous national and international awards. Farrell became a Principal at Architects Hawaii Limited (now known as AHL) in 1969. His projects received over 40 design awards and honors, including the Governor of Hawaii’s Architectural Arts Award, which recognized architects who have produced projects that define “Hawaiian Architecture.” Farrell returned to Sarasota in his retirement and was an active member of the Center for Architecture and Architecture Sarasota before his passing in 2021.
William Rupp continued to practice in Florida until 1967, completing projects such as the dining pavilion for the Ringling Museum of Art and multiple residences in Naples and Sarasota. He moved his practice to New York and Massachusetts in the late 1960s and 1970s and spent his last years teaching as a professor of art and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The legacies of Rupp and Farrell as masters in the Sarasota School of Architecture remain preserved in this building, one of the last remaining commercial or public projects in Sarasota designed by either of the architects.
