In the past 72 hours, Tropical Storm Helene has killed at least 22 people. Houses, infrastructure, and roads in Florida have been decimated. Sanderling Beach Club, a 1952 building designed by Paul Rudolph in Sarasota, has also been completely destroyed.
News of Sanderling Beach Club’s destruction was shared by the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture and Docomomo. It was wrecked by strong winds and rain the evening of September 26.
“We are absolutely gutted to see Paul Rudolph’s Sanderling Beach Cabanas in Sarasota, Florida have been completely destroyed by Hurricane Helene,” Docomomo said on Instagram. “This was the site of our first National Symposium in 2013. We knew this day would come but very sad as reality sets in.”
“Paul Rudolph considered his projects like children and once built ‘each has a power and a life of its own.’ The loss of the cabanas at the Sanderling Beach Club is devastating—another example of Rudolph’s genius now exists only in books and photographs,” Kelvin Dickinson, president of the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, told AN. “We hope there will be—and will fully support—an effort to rebuild the cabanas as Rudolph originally designed them. Until then, it feels like we’ve lost a member of the family.”
Paul Rudolph was 34 years old when he was hired to design Sanderling Beach Club by the Sanderling family, influential Floridian developers who built golf courses. The project on the Siesta Key became known for its cabanas with barrel vaults that go right up to the water. The roofs, Rudolph said, and their curvature were meant to resemble Gulf Coast waves.
A series of additions between 1952 and 1960 transformed the ensemble. Later, the Museum of Modern Art of Sao Paulo, Brazil gave Rudolph an award for Sanderling Beach Club. The project also appeared in The Architecture of Paul Rudolph by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and Gerhard Schwab, published in 1970.
Sanderling Beach Club was designated on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. According to architect Max Strang, who has since visited the wreckage, the architecture is completely destroyed, and there is nothing left to repair.
Strang relayed to the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture that he will present a reconstruction plan for Sanderling Beach Club in the future. Meanwhile, a separate residence by Rudolph in Florida has also experienced flooding. But the full extent of damage is still unknown.
The disaster happened just days before a major retrospective on Rudolph opens at the Met in New York.
