No. 58: Jessie Ball duPont Center, 1965, Jacksonville

Jacksonville hasn’t attracted the world’s “starchitects” to the extent Miami has, but the built environment of Florida’s oldest big city should not be underrated. “The Bold New City of the South” has an impressive number of Prairie Style and midcentury modern houses, and a group of proud skyscrapers of varied ages and styles, starting with century-old Chicago School-influenced office buildings.

Most of the city was rebuilt following the Great Fire of 1901, which destroyed more than 2,000 buildings and 146 city blocks in just eight hours.

After that, New Yorker Henry John Klutho and other northern architects came south to help rebuild the city with modern, fire-resistant structures. The “Laura Street Trio” of three clustered office buildings, the Florida Theater, Klutho’s St. James Building (now City Hall) and the Carling Hotel (now an apartment building), are among the notable structures of the first quarter of the 20th century.

The post-World War II building boom modernized the city — and the Haydon Burns Library was the most modernist when it was built in 1965. As the city experienced the civil rights movement and dealt with a corruption scandal involving government officials, the Burns library was like a refreshing breeze for downtown.

Founded in 1791, Jacksonville is the 12th largest city in the United States by population (890,000) and the largest by land area outside of Alaska, thanks to its 1968 consolidation with Duval County. But it is only the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the state with 1.6 million residents. Miami, Tampa-St. Petersburg and Orlando comprise the top three.

Serving a booming population, the 550,000-volume, 126,000-square-foot Burns library was deemed too small after 40 years of service. In 2005, the city built a new library and sold the Burns building, named for a 1950s Jacksonville mayor and 1960s Florida governor, to a group of private investors. Their efforts failed, and, in 2013, the Jessie Ball duPont Fund paid $2.2 million for the structure, wrote a check for $250,000 in back taxes and undertook a $25 million restoration. The Jessie Ball duPont Center now houses the offices of various nonprofit organizations. KBJ Architects of Jacksonville did the renovation.

In 1960, architect Taylor Hardwick, of the Jacksonville firm Hardwick & Lee (1952-1968), began five years planning and overseeing construction of the $3.7 million midcentury modern building. It struck many residents as odd, but eventually became a beloved downtown landmark with its 88 concrete fins, colorful mosaic mural by Ann Williams and green-tiled support posts. (Photos of the interior may be seen online at http://www.kbj.com/project/jessie-ball-dupont-center.)

“I wanted to make the building a delightful place to inhabit,” he told Jacksonville’s Times-Union newspaper a few weeks before his death at 89 in 2014. In his 2014 book about his career, he wrote that he wanted the library to be “a bright spot in a drab urban environment.”

But when the building became obsolete, it was considered for demolition before the city’s architectural community rallied to raise awareness. Now it is called a “gem.”

Hardwick, a contemporary of better-known Northeast Florida architects Robert Broward and William Morgan, also is known for the Friendship Fountain on the St. John’s River near the distinctive Main Street Bridge. His career spanned from the late 1940s until his retirement in 2001.

“Florida Buildings I Love” is the author’s weekly homage to the state’s built environment. He gives fee-based PowerPoint presentations on the series, and other architectural topics, to various groups. E-mail: Harold.Bubil@heraldtribune.com.