For 60 years, the motel has served tourists who visit the nearby spring. The 200-foot-deep pond has a nearly constant water temperature of 87 degrees, and Eastern Europeans love it for what they say are the health benefits of swimming, or just floating, in it.
Lundy, 95, the eldest surviving member of the “Sarasota school” group of modernist architects, only practiced here for less than a decade, running an office from 1954 to 1960. By the time he moved his office to New York, Lundy was already a local architectural legend.
In those few golden years of the 1950s, when it seemed that all the possibilities and promise of postwar architecture were displayed between the Atlantic and the Pacific, Lundy helped Sarasota gain the world’s attention as a hotspot of progressive design.