Walter Gropius and Robert Murphy

🏛️The era

Orlando in the early 1960s was a city on the cusp of transformation. Central Florida was still mostly citrus groves and small-town downtowns, but change was in the air. Within a few years, the region's quiet character would be upended by the arrival of the space program on the coast and the theme parks that would follow. In this window, a growing city wanted to look modern, prosperous, and forward-facing.

That ambition showed up in its buildings. Across mid-century America, banks and savings-and-loan associations competed to project confidence and progress, and they often did it through bold, clean-lined architecture. A financial institution's headquarters was a statement about the future — and about the city that produced it.

When this round building rose across from Orlando's City Hall in 1964, it planted a piece of that international design conversation right in the heart of a Southern downtown. The very fact that a Florida savings-and-loan reached for cutting-edge modernism tells you how eagerly the city wanted to be seen as part of the modern age.

👥People & events

The building was the work of architect Robert Murphy, a Harvard graduate who had studied under Walter Gropius — the founder of the Bauhaus, the German school that reshaped modern design in the 20th century. To carry that lineage into an Orlando commission was no small thing: it linked a local landmark directly to one of the most influential figures in modern architecture.

Murphy designed the structure for the American Federal Savings and Loan Association, with Frank Sheehy drawing the plans and Jack Jennings serving as general contractor. Together they produced what locals came to call simply "the Round Building," wrapped in a distinctive curtain wall.

That wall was a "brise-soleil" — literally a "sun-breaker," a modernist device meant to shade a building's glass from harsh sun while giving the façade rhythm and texture. In sun-drenched Florida, it was both practical and expressive. The wall was assembled from 120 pre-cast concrete pieces, and the surviving twenty-foot segment preserved here is one of them.

The building stood from 1964 until 2014 — a full half-century — before it came down, leaving this fragment as its memorial.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The story of this fragment is really the story of how a set of radical European design ideas swept across America and settled into ordinary downtowns. The Bauhaus began in Germany, but when its leading figures emigrated, its principles took root in the United States and shaped the look of postwar cities from coast to coast.

Walter Gropius taught a generation of American architects, and through students like Robert Murphy, those ideas spread far beyond the famous towers of major cities. A round bank building in Orlando is proof that modernism was not just for New York or Chicago — it reached fast-growing regional cities that wanted to signal their arrival.

The brise-soleil itself is a small lesson in modernist thinking: form following function, with a practical sunscreen doubling as the building's defining artistic gesture. Preserving even a single segment keeps that idea visible and touchable in a place where the original landmark no longer stands.

🧭If you visit

Come stand beside this twenty-foot slab of pre-cast concrete and try to picture 119 more just like it, marching around a circular building tall enough to face City Hall. What looks at first like an abstract sculpture was once a working skin, designed to tame the Florida sun.

Run your eye over its lines and texture. This is not decorative stone; it's a piece of engineered modernism, one small part of a larger geometric idea. Reading it up close is a chance to appreciate craftsmanship and design intent that's easy to miss when a building is whole and busy.

If you're exploring downtown Orlando, this makes a rewarding stop for anyone curious about architecture and mid-century design. It pairs naturally with a walk around the civic center, where you can imagine the streetscape as it looked between 1964 and 2014 — and appreciate how a lost landmark can still speak through a single saved fragment.