Imagining Naples

Keller had an influence on Bob Forsythe, an architect who moved to Naples in 1968. "He [Keller] was a fine, hard worker and very active in the community," Forsythe says. "I particularly res-pected him and Dick Morris. They treated customers right."

The designer of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Ohio, Forsythe was the associate architect for the Phil-harmonic Center for the Arts (doing all the drawings and overseeing construction) and designed banks and churches, the YMCA and the renovation of the Naples Depot. Forsythe arrived at the request of a group developing the Palm River Country Club. "When they asked me to do that, I didn't even know where Naples was," he recalls. "Naples at that time had two banks and a savings and loan and not many architects. To get anything done, you only had to get three people to approve it-the county attorney, manager and building inspector."

In Port Royal, however, Forsythe, like Morris and Tracy, had to get Sample's approval. "Mr. Sample scared the dickens out of me," he admits with a laugh. "Only a handful of architects were approved [to work there]." Forsythe has the distinction of having designed a home that was rejected by the Port Royal board for being too big. "That would never happen today," he admits.

"Obviously, things were different then," he continues. "One of the first buildings I did in Pelican Bay was a showcase home they used for two or three years. I was given orders. There was to be no Spanish-style architecture in Pelican Bay.

"Everything was pretty ordinary when I first came. Many architects try to invent something absolutely new, but you have to make designs compatible with the area where they're going to be. I didn't come in with any distinctive style. A lot of what we did now looks obsolete, but I think our buildings held their own at the time."

Arriving two years after Forsythe, Mario Lamendola also found a Naples that was still very much a small town. "Most of the homes were Rutenberg," he recalls. "Park Shore was just starting and lots were going for $10,000. I couldn't believe people were paying $10,000 for sand. I was from Illinois, and for $10,000 you got a nice lot with lots of trees."

Lamendola settled in Naples Park, ignoring the comments from locals about being "so far out of town," and opened an office in his home. That siting helped secure his first commission.

"My first really decent job was the Trader Zeke center in Vanderbilt Beach," he says. "Zeke found me because he looked in the telephone book for someone in the neighborhood. From that point, I never had to go out and try to drum up work."

While much of Lamendola's work has been small industrial or commercial projects, the growth of the community afforded him numerous opportunities in buildings that tend to be an early reflection of population increase-churches. In one year, 1979, he had the chance to design St. William's, St. Peter's and St. Eliz-abeth's. "St. William's was the only full church. The others were really multipurpose buildings," he notes.

One of Lamendola's proudest pro-jects: the Bent Pines development off Solana Road. Comprised of modest villas with lofts and nestled among lush vegetation, it offered a chance to do something really different, he says.

Still in practice, Lamendola keeps a photo of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater on the wall of his office. "It keeps me humble," he says.

The 1980s and '90s brought a population boom to Naples, and architects who arrived with the new land rush helped the town grow without losing its charm. Two in particular helped re-establish the town's identity as a special place.

That the city decided to revitalize Fifth Avenue South can largely be traced to Alfred French, who moved here in 1982. Trained in architecture and urban design, French had been heavily involved in the revitalization of downtown Minneapolis. He had served on the urban-design committee of the national AIA (American Institute of Architects), and one of his committee's greatest achievements was the establishment of the Regional/Urban Design Assistance Team (R/UDAT).

"R/UDAT was an all-volunteer, interdisciplinary group," French says. "It could have architects, economists, planners, graphic designers, landscape architects-whatever a community needed."

French, selected as president of the local AIA chapter, asked the national organization to send an R/UDAT team to Naples. Half a dozen professionals (including only one architect) arrived and held a three-day charette, evaluating the town and making recommendations. Among them were to limit buildings to no more than three stories and to revitalize Fifth Avenue.

"That was how Al French and I became such good friends," says Andrea Clark Brown, who arrived around the same time and shared his concerns. "I had a background in planning and was really interested in city planning here. [The visit] was the beginning of my being involved in the fabric of Naples."

Although the R/UDAT plan was temporarily shelved, neither French nor Brown forgot its recommendations. So when the city decided to hire a consultant to look at Fifth Avenue, they supported the move to bring urban planner Andres Duany to town. The two went on to design three of the major cultural landmarks of the street. Brown designed the Sugden Community Theatre, and French designed the Harmon-Meek Gallery (now home to Congress Jewelers) and the von Liebig Art Center.

"I was comfortable with quite large projects," says French, who also redesigned the Gulfview and East Naples middle schools. "And I've always believed front-end planning and programming of the building is probably the most important phase of that building's life. I insisted we talk quite some time."

French faced numerous difficulties with the von Liebig. The city council arbitrarily imposed a 16,000-square-foot limit, for instance. "I knew they needed 18,000 to 20,000 square feet," he says. French resigned himself to the size restriction but insisted on siting the building so it was oriented to both Fifth Avenue and Cambier Park, for aesthetics and to make the structure fully a part of its unique location.

French faced a different challenge with the Harmon-Meek Gallery. The Meeks wanted the gallery to be an enclosed space that people would have to enter in order to view the art. The Duany guidelines, however, called for windows facing Fifth Avenue. "I'd been so involved with the Duany guidelines. I said, 'This can't be a building that violates everything we argued about,'" French explains. "So I came up with a clever solution. We put in windows facing the street, but two feet behind them we put a wall. From the inside, you're completely unaware the windows are there. But it gave a space for art to be displayed and viewed from the street. That's what I call problem-solving."

Brown faced her own challenges with the Sugden, primarily because of the narrowness of the site and the size the building needed to be. But she sees the final design, which won an AIA award, as the culmination of many of the principles she had been developing in other projects through the years, including the play of light and color-both inside and in the plaza out front, which she also designed.

"The Sugden was the convergence of a lot of wonderful studies," she says. "Even the porch out front. I went way back into the history of public design and made sure the scale of the trees would take on the same scale as the theater's columns. I'm always interested in doing something with a contemporary feel, but one informed by the nature of the place. And I like having the landscape be part of the building-mimicking shapes and textures, climbing it, walking through it."

Architecturally, Naples was still flat when Brown and French arrived, but the aftermath of the 1980s recession seemed to bring a wave of change. Flood maps changed after that, which raised houses, making them seem larger. That, in turn, led to even larger homes, often running from lot line to lot line. Ceilings started to reach for the sky, rising from the traditional eight feet to 10 and higher.

"The Italian traditional look responded well to that change of scale," Brown notes. "And that style came to represent a high-end home with a rich history. These [larger] homes also represented greater security that they would make it through the hard weather here."

Despite the larger scale of houses, Naples' downtown retained its charm, largely because of existing planning and zoning. "One of the blessings for Naples was that it was established shortly before the turn of the 19th century, with an historical grid street plan," French says. "They're wonderful. The 19th-century traditional town planning has been far more successful than 20th-century town planning. Before the huge suburban development plan hit Naples, the grid was already established."

Although pleased with downtown redevelopment, Brown and French are concerned about the rest of Naples. French points to the proliferation of strip malls to the east and north.