Friedrich St.Florian: A Retrospective includes more than eighty architectural drawings, sketches, designs, and models, and spans the architect's career from the early 1960s to the present, exploring his "imaginary architecture," residential and commercial projects, competition entries, and design for the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. The exhibition celebrates St.Florian at the time of his retirement from teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design and on the occasion of his award of a Doctorate of Fine Arts honoris causa from Brown University at its 238th commencement. A concurrent exhibition at The RISD Museum, Friedrich St.Florian: Building an Architect, explores the architect as teacher through his preliminary drawings and sketches.

Friedrich St.Florian's career as an architect and teacher spans almost five decades. After early successes in international competitions in the late 1950s, he devoted himself for several years to the development of an "imaginary architecture" in the 1960s and early 1970s. He joined the international avant-garde of architects and designers who were searching for a new approach to design, undeterred by questions of style or structure, but instead stemming from a close cooperation with scientists and artists.

St. Florian designed ephemeral spaces with laser beams (Imaginary Space, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1969) and created collages that suggested a future use for laser holograms: projecting three-dimensional architecture into the night sky (Vanishing New York, 1970). An enormous tower in the heart of Boston (Vertical City, 1964-67) was meant to house an entire city; machine-like in its precise handling of its internal circulation, it pre-dated the so-called "high-tech" architecture of the late 1970s by fifteen years.

St.Florian's best known projects, the design of the Providence Place Mall and the World War II Memorial in Washington D.C., both speak to his respect for the site and its context. While the Providence Place Mall has become the anchor for Providence's downtown development, the much-discussed World War II Memorial has established a new paradigm in commemorative architecture and become one of the most important additions to Washington's memorial landscape.

Competitions have provided some of the key successes and conceptual cornerstones of St.Florian's career. Submissions to a competition are a kind of "imaginary architecture:" still uncontaminated by the influence of the client, financial constraints, and structural necessities, they contain ideas in a purer state and often reveal more than the executed work about the range and quality of an architect's vocabulary. Following the World War II Memorial, St.Florian and his team took part in a variety of major competitions, demonstrating in each case their ability to deal with each task on its own terms, free from stylistic predilections.

The Monument to the Third Millenium for San Juan in Puerto Rico (2000) became a compelling counter piece to the World War II Memorial in Washington. Instead of commemorating facts and dates, losses and victories of the past with a granite enclosed gathering place, this design represents both the uncertainty and the potential beauty of the future with an ephemeral display of light emerging upwards from a luminous base into the nocturnal sky. The competition entry for the Oslo Opera House in the same year, carefully synthesized modern architecture with geographical considerations. Thanks to a filigrane structure of steel and glass, the enormous atrium between the two performance spaces opens up entirely to its impressive surroundings, offering vistas of the city of Oslo and the mountains in the distance, during the luminous northern summer nights. The Jalisco State Public Library (2005) reacted to an entirely different climate, shielding its holdings from the stinging rays of the Mexican sun. The expansive New England Biolabs, immersed almost invisibly into the landscape under a row of luminous, ephemeral greenhouses brought the office an honorable mention in an international competition in 2001.