Born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1887, August Geiger began vacationing in the Miami area with his family around 1899. After completing his formal education at Boardman's Manual Training School, he decided to study architecture, and secured a position with a New Haven firm. In 1905, Geiger moved his permanent residence to Miami, working for a local architectural firm for six years before opening his own practice in 1911.
He experimented with a number of architectural styles, includ-ing the Mission, Italian Renaissance, and Art Deco; he is best known, however, for introducing the Spanish Colonial (also called Mediterranean Revival) style to the area with his design for the Miami City Hospital, locally referred to as "the Alamo." The hospital and the Geiger-designed Miami Beach Municipal Golf Course House, built in 1916, were similar in design. According to the Metropolitan Dade County Office of Community and Economic Development, Historic Preservation Division:
"In both buildings, Geiger employed a classical sense of design through elements like scale, proportion and symmetry, befitting the architects Beaux Arts training. These elements were expressed in a Spanish idiom of applied stucco ornaments, arcaded ground floor loggia and a tile roof. Not truly Spanish, the style was inspired rather by the architecture of California, Texas and New Mexico during the years of Spanish territoriality. Geiger had actually created the earliest traceable example of Spanish Colornial Revival architecture in Miami."
