- September 25, 2024
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In New York, the Metropolitan Museum has the 15 BC Temple of Dendur honoring the Roman goddess Isis. The Sarasota Art Museum has a temple of its own — Galloway’s Furniture Showroom.
Designed by Victor Lundy, the mid-century modern pavilion is to retail what “Notre Dame is to cathedrals,” the Wall Street Journal recently declared.
With such an endorsement, it’s as if the gods themselves looked down from on high and bestowed their blessing on “Modern Masterpiece: Galloway’s Furniture Showroom by Victor Lundy.” The exhibition runs through Oct. 27 at SAM, a contemporary art museum that is part of Ringling College of Art and Design.
Curated by a team led by Architecture Sarasota President Morris (Marty) Hylton III, the exhibition celebrates Lundy’s bold design and reimagines new uses for the once-iconic circular structure of wood and glass.
Lundy, who turned 101 in February, was one of the leaders of the Sarasota School of Architecture, along with Philip Hiss, Paul Rudolph and Ralph Twitchell.
There are probably some who have been in Sarasota long enough to remember Galloway’s, which was built in 1959 and closed five years later. But even longtime residents are more familiar with its incarnation as an optical store in the 1980s.
If you’re a newcomer to Sarasota or haven’t been paying attention, you may be surprised to learn this temple of Florida architecture still stands. In fact, if you look out the window of the B. Claire Rusen Gallery, where the Galloway’s Furniture Showroom show is on display, you can see the original building on the grounds of SAM, which is housed in the old Sarasota High School building.
Its sparkling glass is long gone, covered by a stucco facade. The once magnificent building is surrounded by a prosaic chainlink fence and a parking lot used by SAM employees. It’s as if a once-great beauty has been confined to an institution and is covered with mummy-like bandages.
If you’re driving past the building, you probably wouldn’t notice it except for a mural recently painted on the exterior.
But visitors to the SAM exhibition can get a glimpse of the showroom’s former glory. Or maybe we should say “morning glory,” since Lundy said his design was inspired by the flower that opens in the morning and closes up at night.
According to a full-page ad in the Jan. 25, 1959, edition of The Tampa Tribune, the building’s “laminated arches simulate the stems and the redwood decking the petals of the flowers.”
Other features of the showroom included 290 feet of charcoal glass that was 20 feet high to protect the interior from the sun, and a “floating” mezzanine encircling a “trunk” of redwood in the center of the building.
Some of this grandeur is conveyed on one wall of the SAM exhibition with architect Damien Blumetti’s digital re-creation of the interior of Galloway’s.
Another wall is filled with photographs, news clippings and advertisements for the fabulous furniture showroom. The wall opposing this collage is devoted to possible future uses of the building that were envisioned by students at Hampton University in Virginia.
The exploration of potential restoration and repurposing of the Galloway’s Furniture Showroom by students at Hampton University, a historically Black college, took place through Architecture Sarasota’s Hub initiative. The Hub encourages research and design institutions to use Sarasota as a lab for problem-solving.
Of course, in the end, the fate of Victor Lundy’s creation depends on its owner, Ringling College. But the Hampton University student designs are sure to spark a dialogue within the community about the future of the building.
Those kind of conversations have been taking place more frequently under Architecture Sarasota’s auspices. In addition to preserving the annual tradition of Modernism Weekend, Architecture Sarasota has been engaged in lively discussions about the future of downtown and other design and planning issues since Hylton arrived in January 2023.
Under his stewardship, Architecture Sarasota polled the community and compiled a comprehensive list of significant buildings in town called “Moderns That Matter.” The list of 100 “places and spaces that give Sarasota its sense of place and character” is organized chronologically across 10 categories.
Even though it isn’t a Modern per se, No. 1 on the list is the Caples-Ringling Estates Historic District, including the John and Mable Ringling Museum and the Ca’ d’Zan because of its innovative designs that adapted to Florida’s pre-air conditioning environment.
Coming in at No. 91 on the “Moderns That Matter” ranking (remember, it’s listed chronologically, not by popularity or significance) is Galloway’s Furniture Showroom.
Galloway’s was founded in Tampa by entrepreneur Ralph Galloway in 1948 and expanded to seven locations in Florida. In addition to personally inspecting its Signature Group line of modern furniture, Galloway commissioned cutting-edge architects such as Lundy and Mark Hampton to design its showrooms.
Back in its heydey, the furniture on display was made in Florida. No, this was not the era of made-in-China pieces ordered online from Wayfair and delivered to your door without you ever touching the material or sitting in the chair.
Standing as testament to the real-life shopping experience is a Galloway lounge chair and ottoman in the middle of the gallery floor, not far from a scale model of the showroom where it was once sold.
Hylton has extensive experience in both the academic and historic preservation worlds. Before joining Architecture Sarasota, he spent a more than a decade at the University of Florida as director of its Historic Preservation Program.
Prior to that role, he served as a strategic initiatives manager at the World Monuments Fund. A native of Kentucky, Hylton earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Kentucky and a master’s at Columbia University.
Hylton’s role in an initiative exploring future uses for Galloway’s Furniture Showroom isn’t the first time he’s been involved in trying to save a historic building in Sarasota. While at the University of Florida, Hylton was part of an effort to preserve Rudolph’s Riverview High School building, which was constructed in 1958 and demolished in 2009 to make way for its successor.
A walkthrough of the Galloway’s exhibition with Hylton and Virginia Shearer, SAM's executive director, makes it abundantly clear that fate will never befall the landmark building in SAM’s backyard.
“The restoration and repurposing of the pavilion to serve Sarasota Art Museum and the community would be one of the most important projects to preserve and reimagine a Sarasota School resource,” Hylton says.
SAM was formed by 13 founding members in 2004 in concert with Ringling College. However, it didn’t formally open until 2019.
SAM Executive Director Virginia Shearer explains that Ringling College bought the former furniture showroom in 2009 to gain control over the neighboring property to SAM, which has a 99-year lease with the Sarasota County school district.
“It was understood that it could be a beacon but it was also an exposure. It could be turned into something that didn’t align with the museum or it could be torn down,” she says.
There are a few cultural projects in the area looking for donors. Sarasota Orchestra’s new Music Center on Fruitville Road, Florida Studio Theatre’s new Mulva Arts Plaza and Venice Theatre’s reconstruction of its Jervey Theatre in the wake of Hurricane Ian are just three of them.
But maybe there’s an architecture-minded donor who wants to help make Lundy’s mid-century modern masterpiece a meeting place for the in crowd once again. There’s no plan yet, but the space clearly deserves a more lofty purpose than storage.
Hylton notes there have been innovations in heat-resistant windows since the building’s original construction. If it is renovated with state-of-the-art materials, the glass pavilion could become yet another example of how Sarasota architecture is at the forefront of meeting environmental demands.
