Flashback: Galloway’s Furniture Store, 1959
Galloway's Furniture Store, designed by architect Victor Lundy.
Hard to believe that architect Victor Lundy’s dazzling Galloway’s Furniture Store showroom, shown here after its completion in 1959, morphed in the 1970s into a nondescript Visionworks optical store and recently into the new Sarasota Art Museum’s annex, The Works.
The building, on Tamiami Trail just north of Sarasota High School, was a showcase for Lundy’s signature glass walls and wood-laminate trusses, which also can be admired in his classic Herron House on the island of Venice.
Image: Courtesy Christopher Wilson
Lundy, an influential member of the Sarasota School of Architecture from 1951-1960, designed some of the area’s most beautiful buildings in his nine years in Sarasota. Among them are the cobalt blue-tiled Pagoda Building on North Tamiami Trail (now the home of The Bay pubic park project), the glass-walled South Gate Community Center on Phillippi Creek, the geometric-roofed Warm Mineral Springs Motel in North Port, and St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on Bahia Vista Street, whose sweeping winged roofline continues to inspire. Among his international work, he designed the “Bubbles Pavilion” for the 1964 New York World’s Fair and the U.S. Embassy in Sri Lanka.
Lundy revisited Sarasota in 2016, at the age of 94, when he was the focus of the Sarasota Architectural Foundation’s annual MOD Weekend.
The building after it became Visionworks in the 1970s.
Image: Courtesy Christopher Wilson
