Sarasota is so famous for the Sarasota School of Architecture that we sometimes forget that we do have other schools, too, and all over town. There’s even a world-famous example of the Frank Lloyd Wright school, the Van Wezel. Wright didn’t design it; that was done by his appointed heir and son-in-law Wesley Peters. But two completely different forms of modernism, built at the same time in the1960s and early ’70S. Do they have anything in common?

One link is a local architect named Robert Schennum. He worked with virtually all the big names in the Sarasota School—Twitchell, the Zimmermans, Jack West, Frank Folsom Smith. He also had his own firm at various times. But he got his start when Wesley Peters sent him down from Taliesin, Wright’s famous home and studio in Wisconsin, where Schennum had been living and working, to oversee the building of the Van Wezel.

Schennum stayed on after the Van Wezel was completed in 1970 and had a long career in Sarasota. He worked on everything from Tuttle Elementary to the U.S. Garage to Temple Beth Shalom. His most famous design is one of the area’s legendary properties—a 1,000-acre cattle ranch on the Peace River in Arcadia. It was built in 1993 for Ed and Darlene Lowe, the couple who made a fortune when Ed invented kitty litter. The home is over 13,000 square feet and features five guest houses (a “lazy river” style pool connects them), stocked fishing ponds, fountains, multiple barns and outbuildings, gazebos, and orange groves.

But another one of Schennum’s designs has just come on the market in Sarasota. Listed at $1.1 million, the home has multiple connections to our artistic history. It was originally designed in the late 1940s by the father-son team of Ralph and William Zimmerman and was one of a dozen or so homes they built along South Shore Drive in Sapphire Shores. Schennum remodeled the home in 1992, and it has all the features you would expect in a midcentury modern classic—an open layout, large expanses of glass, and an openness with the outside. There’s plenty of privacy, yet the tropical atmosphere is always there, visible and giving the home its special appeal.

Its most recent owner was the painter and writer Pat Kaufman. A member of the famous Soho arts scene in New York in the 1970s and ’80s, Pat was a contemporary of the famous group who changed American art—people like James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg and Dan Flavin. Her paintings still fill the home, giving it a powerful energy and, not incidentally, demonstrating what a perfect home it is for an artist.

Schennum’s remodel gives us a tantalizing peek at his Wrightian vision of intersecting planes and horizontal lines. The windows let in a tremendous amount of light and the high ceilings give the extra-large living room a studio-like atmosphere. Schennum even designed a Wrightian exterior elevation, with a complex grid pattern, but the final result ended up a simpler Sarasota School-type version.

Schennum was one of several lesser-known architects who practiced alongside the famous men of the Sarasota School. They created designs, detailed drawings and supervised construction. Their place in the scheme of things has yet to be determined; what credit they deserve is ambiguous. Usually these architects were listed as “associate,” or some such lesser title, with the architect of record getting all the acclaim. The town’s most famous architectural scandal involves such a situation, with Lou Schneider claiming on the front page of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that he was responsible for many of the innovations that made Plymouth Harbor such a success, and not Frank Folsom Smith, the architect of record.

Schennum’s son Eric agrees his father lacked the big ego and ambition that Sarasota architects were famous for. “He admitted he wasn’t good at promoting himself,” Eric says. “His art was more important to him that anything.”

455 S. Shore Drive is listed for $1.1 million. Contact David Jennings (941-650-7354) or Ulrica Regnander (941-928-5151) of Coldwell Banker Realty to learn more.