The first item on the agenda, the show at Architecture Sarasota’s downtown headquarters, demonstrated the remarkable breadth of Sarasota’s design legacy. Moderns That Matter: Sarasota 100 represents the culmination of a years-long research project, identifying and documenting local landmarks from the early-20th century to today. The name of the exhibition is somewhat misleading: “It’s actually a lot more than a hundred,” notes Hylton, who economized by cataloging multiple projects by the same designer under a single heading. This was the method deployed for the architect whose name is most often associated with the city, and whose projects—as they appear on the giant map that accompanies Moderns That Matter’s interpretive panels—appear more often than any other: Paul Rudolph, who completed some twenty-odd buildings in Sarasota during the 1950s and 60s, establishing a reputation that would carry him to national and international renown.

The Rudolph connection was the chief rationale for giving the Hiss prize (named for a local developer who commissioned many of Rudolph’s earliest projects) to Foster. “I met him on my first day at the Yale School of Architecture in 1961,” Foster recalled, speaking prior to the award lecture. “He was intense, passionate, fired by an idea of architecture.” The Pritzker Prize winner’s lecture took Sarasotans through a project-by-project tour of his London-based practice over the course of the last two decades—and though it made little explicit reference to his former teacher’s buildings as such, anyone familiar with the work of both could connect the dots, Rudolph’s taste for structural invention and emphatic form-making seeming an obvious precedent to his student’s subsequent projects around the world.

More surprising even for some seasoned architecture lovers was the sheer abundance of outstanding buildings around Sarasota—not just from Rudolph, but from contemporaries like Ralph Twitchell and Victor Lundy, as well as by 21^st-century practitioners like Jonathan Parks and Damien Blumetti—as evidenced both in the Moderns That Matter exhibition, and on the streets and boat-lined canals that snake through the bayfront community. “People think the Sarasota School was something that happened in the past and that it’s over now,” says Hylton. “It isn’t.” As if to prove the point, the awards dinner was hosted at a large house created by Guy Peterson in 2007, wrapped gently around the tiny 1948 Revere Quality House designed by Rudolph and Twitchell. With Rudolph’s Cocoon House just visible across the nearby waterway, Foster took the stage to accept the prize from Hylton, who appeared to relax for the first time all week (or perhaps in two years) and enjoy the applause of an appreciative Sarasota crowd.