a place to post frank lloyd wright thoughts
 

we done veered off the subject on another thread so i thought out of respect for plantman we could take our discussion of FLW architecture to another place.

i have visited his homes in a number of places. they are scattered around the country. i believe there are 400 or so buildings that he has done.

there is a louis sullivan bank in west lafayette with the fabulous terra cotta around the windows in the brick building. it is not very big and i would love to buy it some day. i have no idea if it could be bought though. it has been "modernized" with a dropped ceiling and the inside is pretty much devoid of details. i hope that they may exist above the grid.

the biggest concentration of wright buildings is in oak park illinois. there must be at least twelve buildings including his home and studio dating from around 1929 or so and the unity temple, a unitarian church with very striking, unique features. there are a good many homes near his home, all on a walking tour. if you are a fan it is worth a trip.

another place with a good group of buildings is Lakeland college in florida. there are at least six or eight buildings there including an administration building and a large chapel (or auditorium). there is also an extensive system of shaded walkways with concrete roof and collonade. that is worth a trip too if you are in the area. i have been there too. and a niece and nephew attended there, recently graduating.

for me, a visit to NY and the gugenheim and the empire state building and perhaps the statue of liberty. i probably will skip ground zero because i just think it would be too gut wrenching.

tom w

I enjoyed the Guggenheim. There's a FLW house in McCook NB.

Has anyone visited the roofless church in New Harmony IN? Done by the same architect who did the High Museum in Atlanta (I think) but I can't remember his name. It's one of my favorite churches, almost as powerful as Mont St. Michel and it is right across the street from Paul Tillich's grave.

I know, thread his already hijacked from FLW to architecture in general.

Tom, if you're going to head East, best to hit Fallingwater first.

One of the homes here is a small studio like set up, two other are $500,000 which is a tad above the median home for the neighborhood, the other which was originally built by the Dow's (dow chemical) is huge I am not sure how much it would sell for but it has the watch tower office and many other unique amenities. The community that they are in and where I went to school had a population of less than 5000 at the time so everyone knew about the FLW homes. There are a few (I think 10) more FLW homes but for some reason they don't get the nod from the FLW registry or something, I am not sure what the criteria is to get the official OK from the FLW guys.

A repost but would like to know what exactly makes an official FLW home.

i dont know, but perhaps they were done by his studio after he died. or by an admirer.

folks often arent to picky about such little details. (sarcasm)

tom w

I know the prints are his just like the four "official" flw homes but I think they needed to be built by a FLW apprentice or something to be "official".

i have been there. it is very very special. if he had done nothing else that home would have sealed his reputation. the drive there is very nice too. and the driveway back through the woods. when i did it i was pulling my 24' wilderness trailer. i thought.."great i am going to get back there and there will be no place to park my trailer" (based on the narrow gravel driveway)...of course when we got back there there was room to park at least 20 greyhounds!

the two most memorable details which i didnt remember seeing in any books prior to visiting were the rock in the floor in front of the fireplace and the bookended wood veneer on the doors of the continuously built in closet running along the back of the master bedroom area (i think that was where it was).

definately worth a trip. i have a picture of my entire family under the house at the waterfall. i guess it must have been fifteen years ago since my youngest was just a babe then. and she is a frosh in college now (studying architecture at bsu as i did).

tom w

i see one of them is for sale and it is a friends parents home.

http://www.savewright.org/wright_on_the_market/schaberg/schaberg.html

i dont mind. i will have to try to get down there and check it out.

another of my favorite places is thomas jefferson's monticello and his university of virginia campus cental space. very very special.

tom w

This is another that is a few doors down from the first house I purchased on my own.
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http://www.savewright.org/wright_on_the_market/goetsch-winkler/images/gw_kitchen.jpg

Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob are near each other. The only things that seem dated in FLW's designs are the small kitchens, and lack of a garage. Some of his furniture wasn't exactly built for comfort either. Kentuck Knob has nice grounds with sculpture gardens if you have the extra time.

If FLW was the superior engineer that everyone raves about Fallingwater would not have been falling down and had to have millions of dollars in repairs in the last few years. His designs, I am told, were strictly his creations and his customers needs came secondary. Since he was a short person, he designed the interors of his homes to accommodate smaller people. This was all stated in the tour we took through Fallingwater.

I am suprised to see a flw thread without Racine Wisconsin being mentioned. Johnson Wax, Wingspread conference center and several houses.

cool link. thanks for sharing.

tom w

well, first off, he attended architecture school not engineering. second he never graduated, dropping out late in the game to go to work. third, you are right in saying he was a little cavalier about his client's needs, if you believe what you read.

in my experience though, what is said between client and architect makes a big difference in how things go and we will never know what was said, only what we read. history is not always accurate. his buildings often contained groundbreaking ideas that stretched the engineering knowledge of the day. anytime you do this there will be things that fail sooner than what is normal.

i have done this on occasion. one time a lawsuit resulted, another time my client understood that part of the adventure included a bit of risk and worked with me to solve the problem and never complained. so today i tend, as most professionals do, to try to keep my pushing of the envelope in the area of forms and functions and use known and proven materials and methods as much as possilble. lawsuits are no fun.

i do think though if you never have had one or two you probably have not reached far enough.

he had a giant ego, and a creative urge to match. he tried big ideas and succeeded much more than anybody else. his body of work is not matched by any other architect that i know of.

i have maybe three hundred built projects but that number includes a fair number of bread and butter hobs where we just provided a service and no creativity was really on the table because the client simply wanted a pole barn or something very functional and so we did it to put bread on the table. i do have maybe 100 that i am proud of for their innovation and design. and the roofs dont leak. and we met the budget so the project was not abandoned. as far as i know flw didnt do any mundane jobs. or at least they arent in any books.

as far as him being short, that is true. i am 5' 8. his homes did contain some low spaces...maybe 7'. but they usually also contained tall spaces. he liked to contrast short compact spaces to tall spacious ones so that the impact of the difference was maximized. most architects do this. also remember that folks were shorter then than they are now. a 7' person was almost never seen then.

but we have fun and help folks get things built and if it is possible to do some good design in the mix that will be done too.

tom w

I am a big FLW fan and appreciate good architecture. I visited Florida Southern in Lakeland and Taliesin West in AZ. I would really like to see Fallingwater someday, it's on my list. We built/live in a house designed by one of his students, John Rattenbury (it was the Life Magazine Dream house 1997).

tom- have you ever ventured further south to Columbus, IN and seen the whole town full of great structures by Saarinen etc?

Rick

Not to get off topic, but if you guys like FLW you might also appreciate the Greene Brothers.

http://www.gamblehouse.org/

http://www.furnituremaker.com/

I like FLW but G+G a good bit better.

yes, indeed, many times. saarenin's churches stand out in my mind, bothe eliel and arrenin (sp?). colombus in has a lot to offer, all from the vision of mr. miller, the president of cummins who many years ago offered to pay the architecture fee for any person or business who would allow him to choose the architect. and he always chose great ones!

tom w

the greenes are great too. but i dont think i have ever been in one of their homes. i have abook on them though and their use of wood is exquisite.

tom w

those links are interesting. i will try to look deeper tonight.

ok, i just took the tour of the gamble house. wow! the whole interior is like living in an exquisite piece of futniture. the exterior doesnt work as well as the inside but it is still nice especially the landscaping. i didnt realize that they were japanese influenced but after reading it it is clearly so.

ok i just looked at the furniture some more. do you think they would take a sec in trade? nice stuff.

tom w

Tom,

Here's a link to Church's, designed by FLW.

http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/fa267/FLW_churches.html

I saw a similar Greek Orthodox Church, in a Sydney suburb, in OZ. It looked similar to the one shown in Wauwautosa , WI.

YIA...Paul.

cool link paul. it hit me that the annuncialtion church must have been the model for one of my classmate's thesis designs! only in his version it was a stadium of some type!

that one in shorewood was exquisite. the inside views remind of the chapel on lakeland campus.
the other jewish temple was very nice too.

yeah, he was damned good!

tom w

I have seen lots of new commercial buildings locally in the last couple of years with details that I associate with FLW...prairie-ish roofs with huge overhangs and shallow pitch, the use of stone and stucco wall finishes, windows set in a fashion that looks FLWish to me. These tend to be banks, doctor's offices and other upscale construction.

I don't "get" some of his Utopian construction, the lower end homes that could be do-it-yourself, including making your own concrete blocks. I have to imagine that acres of single pane glass and flat roofs just didn't lend themselves to use in cold climates.

yeah, they were an attempt to reach ordinary folks.

of course the ranch home is a direct result of wright's influence.

a few years back i did a major addition to a vaguely flw ranch home in west lafayette for a professor and his wife. i took the original design one level higher in its flw nod. it came out pretty well. they loved it. and in the beginning they were a little ambivilant about taking money out of the stock market to do the addition but in the end decided they wanted the house addition and just did it.

and it turned out that taking the money out of the stocks and putting it into real estate at that time was the perfect thing to do as stocks tanked just after they did the addition.

nice folks too.

and that job led to another addition a couple blocks away that turned out real well too, but the client's wife was ..... not so nice.

when you get into high income clients a much higher percentage of them turn out to be high maintenance.

tom w

Tom, I forgot to mention in my previous post of the Domino's Pizza Corporate HQ, in Ann Arbor, MI. Tom Monahan, built it according to FLW's ideas on a corporate bldg, that were never built. Tom Monahan was a real fan and purchased a FLW chair for some $$$$$ price. If you recall he paid the first $1 million for a Duesenberg. If you get up to Ann Arbor, you have to see the building as it is the largest building in the world under a copper roof when it was built. It looks like The Great Hall of China, to me, it's big. YIA...Paul

Have you not seen the Greene Bros work until now Tom? It's hard to beleive anyove who is into FLW was not learned about the Bros. Look more into them and their interiors, awesome stuff IMHO.

that is very interesting looking. i am surprised i have not seen it before. it sure doesnot look dated. i will have to try to go experience it first hand to see how it works.

thanks for the post.

tom w

yeah, i knew about his flw admiration and have seen some publications of things he had built along those lines.

what i remember was that he paid 11m for a bugatti royale, the one that is generally considered the least attractive in terms of body style. then a few years later came on harder times and sold it for a loss of several mil.

i have an autographed copy of his book "pizza tiger".

tom w

as noted above i have a book about them. and enjoy it very much. their work, though is all in california i believe and so makes it tough to visit for a midwesterner who has only been to california once.

tom w

I read somewhere that LFW had a thing for red cars, and LOVED Crosley cars, for some unknown reason. When they did the seasonal migration to the West campus, they did so in a parade of red cars, withe FLW leading the way, and his apprentices tagging along.

The only REAL FLW house in St. Louis, that I know of, was given to the County, and it's been restored. It is open for tours occasionally, but its location in a quiet suburban setting with limited parking doesn't lend itself to big tours and lots of people traipsing through.

he liked i think it was navajo red. he used a square of it as a kindof logo on his drawings. he also liked to have cars that color.

i read somewhere that when the original lincoln contintntal came out in 39 he went to the local dealer and said that the worlds most famous architect should be driving one for free and said i want two in navajo red. and next day picked them up.

actually sounds like urban legend. i wouldnt put it past wright to ask for one but i question if they would give him one.

but they did drive out there in a caravan. i have seen pictures of that.

tom w

He also had a fiftie's Mercedes adenauer.

i didnt know that. it doesn't surprise though.

i have always had a soft spot for those big babes!

i remember seeing a cabrio in southern spain, malaga i think, when i was there in 1973. i just thought it was grand.

i dont think i have ever seen one driving around here though.

i did see a late fifties or early sixties 300sl roadster though. a contractor in indy.

tom w

Furthermore, he designed a small new car showroom constructed on Park Avenue for famed car importer Max Hoffman. It's currently a Mercedes dealership.

http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/hoffman/index.htm

yes, as i remember that is kindof a prelude to the fabulous gugenheim museum.

i think it is still being used as a car dealer.

tom w

I was in Malaga in 1973, too. Lovely city. I'd like to go back for a visit.

B

i particularly loved the huge trees down by the ocean and the park. it was on the edge of that place i saw the 300d, in front of a big hotel or perhaps it was an embassey. (sp?)

spain was a lovely place. honest friendly people. of course franco was in power then.

tom w

The trees you mention I don't recall. I do remember the palm tree along the thoroughfare that paralleled the Med. I had just bought a camera and so I must have taken 10 rolls of pix of Malaga, thence to Mallorca.

Did you got to Torremolinos? I spent some time in several night clubs over there. I hope they don't remember me unkindly.

Malaga was the first city in which history became real for me. I toured some fortress in which the Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Moorish, and Spanish construction had been revealed. I took pix with my old Yashica SLR in Kodachrome as the sun went low on the horizon. The pix are so beautiful that I wish I had the artistic skill to claim I had planned it.

If you give 1,000 monkey's a Yashica SLR eventually one of the will take a good photograph.

torromolinos, yes. we rented an apartment for a month in carvajal, just southwest along the coast from torromolinos. i remember three things about torromolinos. one a tower that was circular kindof like the twin towers in chicago called marina city, two a british style restaurant with excellent fish and chips, run of course by an indian, and a line of taxis near the restaurant all shiny, all diesels and all idling contentedly. many of them were the spanish fiats called seats and many ran the little sign on the side "mercedes benz diesel".

i remember one night we were low on dough waiting for my next check to come in (monthly). we were down to peanut butter and french bread i think or maybe salami. and we were out for a walk and there sitting on a bench at the bus stop was a sack of groceries. it was like a gift from God. nobody was around, so we took it home. there was a nice piece of meat, very white, i guessed it was mutton. we baked it and enjoyed it very much.

there was a little range of mountains that went up from the coast maybe a thousand feet or less i suppose. we climbed up to the top one day. it was very quiet but we could hear clearly fishing boats out about a mile or so with that distinctive thump thump of a one cylinder diesel.

it was a lovely place and a lovely time in my life.

tom w