A giant of twentieth century architecture, Paul Rudolph began his career designing beautiful and intimate beach houses on the west coast of Florida. This new book presents Rudolph's striking renderings and Ezra Stoller's period photography, along with the authors' insightful text, conveying the lightness, materiality, and transcendence of these intensely original houses. Paul Rudolph's Florida houses, seen all together for the first time in this book, illustrate the ambition, discipline, and inve..ntiveness that led the way to Rudolph's international prominence in the 1960s. With fifty years distance, we are now able to see the Florida Houses as a distinct body of work, some sixty projects created between 1941 and 1962, that came to represent the possibility of a locally inspired American modernism. After disappearing from the scene for many years, these outstanding buildings are being discussed again, inspiring a new generation of architects searching for a meaningful architecture for the present. This is the first book to be published based on full access to the primary source material housed in the Paul Rudolph Archive at The Library of Congress.