Clifford Wright - Maitland and Winter Park's local architect

 

    Clifford William Wright was born at in the hamlet of Oceanside in Nassau county, Long Island, New York on April 15, 1933, yet spent most of his childhood in the Winter Park/Maitland area. He received his Bachelor of Architecture in 1955 got his license and moved across the street from the Meyer family where he would then build a house for them completed in the end of 1959. Clifford Wright’s career focused around the Winter Park, Maitland, and larger Florida area with other buildings being the expansion to the Ortronix Plant completed in 1960 in Goldenrod, the Schroeder Warehouses in Winter park in 1959-1960, a shop in Pine castle in 1959, a food store building in Orlando in 1961, an Apartment building in Sarasota in 1961 and the residence of Allan Hickok in Winter Park 1961 as well as condos in the Maitland and Winter park area around the 1960s.

    Wright spent two months coming up with the design for the Meyer residence and was pushed by Mrs. Meyer’s artistic demands to create the unique A-framed structure. Wright designed the house to be easily cooled despite the 32-foot overhead by allows cooler air to collect towards the bottom of the house, however this property would also make it difficult to heat the house in the winter, so Wright designed a brick fire place to help for Florida’s short winters. In designing the Meyer family’s residence, he was challenged to anchor the tall 32-foot A-framed structured against hurricanes and other strong winds. The answer was using steel plates to clamp the support beams in the center structure and anchor them into large pieces of concrete buried underneath the ground.

                The house was of a modern design in 1959 by following the recent trend of A-framed houses started in 1957 by Andrew Geller and designed with a sunken living room, wall to wall carpet, aluminum construction and newly prefabricated wooden beams and thirty two double glass windows along the two major A-framed walls. Wright balanced the unique structure with two traditional expansions on both sides of the A-framed featuring additional bedrooms and bathrooms on one side and a three-car garage on the other.

"New Home Will Offer Refreshing Taste in Design; Modern Thought Used in Dramatic A-Frame,” Orlando Sentinel, Oct. 4, 1959, p. 3

Interview and House Tour with Piney Croft Architect Clifford Wright, Sunday, April 29, 2018.

"WRIGHT, CLIFFORD W(ILLIAM). AIA 57. Mid-Florida Chapter." AIA Historical Directory of American Architects.
https://aiahistoricaldirectory.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AHDAA/pages/20677106/1962+American+Architects+Directory

"Ortronix Inc. Building Storage Space for Overflow." Orlando Evening Star, Feb. 9, 1961, p. 7

"Campus Would Rather be 'Wright'." Miami Herald, Mar. 18, 1973, p. 231