Phineas Paist
The Arc
Phineas Paist was a trained, experienced architect — he had worked on Villa Vizcaya, James Deering's bayfront estate, before joining George Merrick's project — and he brought professional rigor to the artistic vision that Merrick and Denman Fink supplied. As supervising architect (and later the city's first official architect) of Coral Gables during the 1920s boom, Paist's job was to translate a Mediterranean Revival fantasy into a coherent, enforceable, buildable reality across an entire planned city.
His most prominent surviving work is Coral Gables City Hall (1928), a semicircular, colonnaded landmark that has become an unofficial emblem of the city. More broadly, Paist helped establish the architectural standards and review discipline that gave Coral Gables its unusual visual consistency — the system that, long after the boom collapsed, kept the city looking like itself.
Why They Matter
Paist is the professional spine of the Coral Gables project — the figure who ensured that a poet's vision and an illustrator's imagination became a real city that worked and lasted. The architectural coherence of Coral Gables, enforced first by Paist and then by the review boards that followed his standards, is precisely what makes the city a near-unique survival: a 1920s planned aesthetic preserved essentially intact for a century.
He also embodies the collaborative nature of the boom's best work. Coral Gables was not one man's doing but a disciplined team's — Merrick the visionary, Fink the artist, Paist the architect — and Paist's contribution, the least romantic of the three, may be the most responsible for the city's durability.
Where You See Them Today
Coral Gables City Hall still stands as Paist's signature building and a civic emblem. The architectural standards he helped establish live on in the city's famously strict review process. And the buildable coherence of Coral Gables as a whole — the fact that the dream actually got built and stayed standing — is his quiet legacy.
Further Reading
- Arva Moore Parks, George Merrick, Son of the South Wind
- Coral Gables Historical Resources materials
- Histories of Coral Gables and Vizcaya architecture
Neighborhoods: Coral Gables Eras: The 1920s Land Boom Related people: George Merrick · Denman Fink