BY DESIGN

Ca’ d’Zan, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota. After John Ringling established the winter quarters for “The Greatest Show on Earth” in Sarasota, he and his wife Mabel built a flamboyant Gothic Revival mansion at the edge of Sarasota Bay in 1926. (This and other captions are adapted from Greacen’s book.)

On the Dots

A pen-and-ink Tampa artist recreates memorable Florida buildings.

More than 150 Florida buildings, from famous landmarks to vintage cottages, are reproduced in ultra-realistic detail in Charles Greacen’s new Florida Landmarks, Lodgings & Legends: Drawings and Sometimes Accurate Accounts. Working with a pen designed for drafting and architecture, Greacen, a graphic artist and illustrator, creates detailed images using a painstaking linedrawing technique called stippling—drawing tiny dot after dot after dot. Although his process is laborious and time-consuming—Greacen once decided to count the number of dots in a square inch and came up with a total of 1,500—he says, “It’s also kind of mesmerizing.”

A college teacher “taught me how to see buildings and appreciate their nuances,” says Greacon, and he began photographing and drawing buildings, first in his hometown of Tampa and then around the state, as a hobby. When COVID hit and his business slowed, he decided to bring the drawings together in a book, adding sometimes droll commentary about each one.

“I’m thankful for the diversity of architecture in this state,” he says. “We have everything from colonial to the outrageous.”

Buildings, he says, wear their creator’s hopes and dreams, and perhaps nowhere more than in Florida, the land of new beginnings. “In Florida, architecture is more willing to let loose,” he says. “A lot of it expresses people’s extra-high hopes here, the flamboyance of paradise and dreams to be fulfilled.” —Pam Daniel

Published by St. Petersburg Press, Florida Landmarks, Lodgings and Legends is available online and in selected book stores.

Annie Pfeiffer Chapel, Lakeland. In the late 1930s, Florida Southern College’s president, Ludd Spivey, invited Frank Lloyd Wright to develop a master plan for the campus and gave him a free hand. The chapel, Wright’s first building, completed in 1941, has a bowtie design on the 65-foot tower that’s an icon for the school, which has the largest grouping of Wright buildings anywhere.

Century Tower, Gainesville. The University of Florida’s original campus design called for a gothic tower at its center. Century Tower, completed in 1953, has a belfry sporting 12 bells. The 61 chimes that make up its full carillon range from a modest 15-pounder to a B-flat gong that weighs 7,000 pounds. Edison Winter Home, Fort Myers. Edison drew plans and had his “Seminole Lodge” prefabricated in Maine, then shipped to its destination on the banks of the Caloosahatchee River. In 1925, he planted a 4-foot ficus tree, which has grown into a towering one-acre-diameter banyan tree, just one of roughly 1,000 varieties of plants he amassed on his Florida property.

Centro Asturiano de Tampa. When the headquarters of Centro Asturiano, a club for Tampa’s cigar workers, was destroyed by fire in 1910, the society aspired to replace it with the grandest club in the city. M. Leo Elliot, considered the dean of Tampa architecture, designed a showcase with ballroom, cantina, theater, library, gym and an onyx bar the club claims is the longest in the world. McMullen-Coachman Log Cabin, Largo. When hostilities broke out with the Seminoles in the mid-19th century, settlers James McMullen and his bride were forced to abandon their newly built cabin only to find it burned when they returned. Their second cabin, built in 1852, is the oldest surviving home in Pinellas County.