Ralph Spencer Twitchell (July 27, 1890 – January 30, 1978) was one of the founding members of the Sarasota School of Architecture. He is considered the father of the group of modernist architecture practitioners, that includes Paul Rudolph and Jack West, and other modernist architects who were active in the Sarasota area in the 1950s and 1960s like Ralph and William Zimmerman, Gene Leedy, Mark Hampton, Edward “Tim” Seibert, Victor Lundy, William Rupp, Bert Brosmith, Frank Folsom Smith, James Holiday, Joseph Farrell and Carl Abbott. He bridged the more traditional architecture of his early work in Florida during the 1920s with his modernist designs that began in the 1940s.