In other buildings, such as L. Murray Dixon's Senator Hotel (1939), it was the corner-based design aesthetic of the moderne style that predominated (138). Such deliberately vertical corner masses, heading sweeping lateral lines, were even employed in buildings with a direct frontal orientation, such as the Waldorf Towers (1937) by Albert Anis (139). Although the style was only used sporadically for domestic architecture, some of the most elegant expressions of the style were achieved in apartment buildings where the demand to distinguish the entrance were more moderate. Henry Hohauser's apartment building and Roy F. France's Euclid Avenue Apartment building demonstrate the range, from very exuberant to very subdued, that could be achieved in such buildings. The Wagner residence (c. 1958) typifies the wooden construction of the early settlements along the Miami River. Balloon construction and stock lumber were not available in the region and the Wagner house employs heavy, hand-hewn timbers joined with mortise and tenon connections and pegs. But the most important of the extant nineteenth-century buildings is the home of Commodore Ralph Munroe, "The Barnacle" (1891, raised to two stories in 1908). Munroe first visited the region in 1877 and returned frequently. He persuaded Charles and Isabella Peacock to open the first hotel in 1882 and later built his own home. The Barnacle was raised above the ground to accommodate flooding and featured broad deep porches running around the outside under a hipped roof that rose to a skylight which also created a funnel effect, pulling breezes through the house. The lumber was imported from Pensacola but the building was the first important example of the region's architectural style. In the rush to development various strands of Miami architecture emerged simultaneously. The hipped-roof with deep porches predominated in vernacular architecture. Earlier settles had found that the pitched roofs designed to shed nor |
