On Monday, September 6, PBS will air the documentary Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City. Check local listings, as the tote-bag cadres like to say.
Watch it.
And it wouldn’t kill you to become a member of your local PBS station during the next pledge drive.
The DVD can also be bought directly from the film’s site.
In New York, The center for Architecture is offering a tour of Usonia, New York:
Join us for an insider’s tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian Homes led by Roland Reisley, original Wright house owner and author of “Usonia, New York: Building a Community With Frank Lloyd Wright”
Ticket includes bus transportation to and from Usonia, boxed lunch and a tour of four Usonian Houses: Reisley House, Cooper House, Serlin House and Resnick House.
The tour is October 2, 11:30AM to 5PM. Registration by September 15 is required. You can register here. The cost is $150 and the event benefits the youth and family programs of the Center.
The book, Usonia, New York: Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright is available at Amazon.com.
This Friday, September 3, Mark Hertzberg will be signing copies of his new book Frank Lloyd Wright’s SC Johnson Research Tower at the Racine Art Museum Store. The event is part of the First Friday event in downtown Racine. 6PM to 7:30PM.
I’ve always thought that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City has been over-criticized. Yeah, with decades of hindsight, it seems like a really bad idea and, God knows, I would not enjoy living there (I hate dealing with cars). But Broadacre would be an idyllic paradise compared to many, many other — worse — would-be utopias.
The Web Urbanist is one of the those daily catalogs of potentially interesting things, mostly intended to distract you from getting your work done — you know, the site you go to read about “Ten Western Ghost Towns” or “Ten Scary Looking Parasites that Live in Your Kitchen”. Yesterday they posted “Retro-Futurism: 13 Failed Urban Design Ideas”. Of course Broadacre City made the list, but it is by far the least awful of the places (with the possible exception of Boozetown). Admittedly, it’s not a real accomplishment to be less unpleasant than Hitler’s Welthauptstadt, but even Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine looks hellish next to Wright’s vision of suburbia.
Today marks the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the loss of an important portion of the legacies of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan. Three structures linked to Wright were built in Ocean Springs, Mississippi — The Charnley Cottage, the Charnley Guest Cottage and the winter home of Louis Sullivan. At the time the homes were designed, Wright was a draftsman for Sullivan’s firm and he later claimed credit for them. At the very least, the homes were the result of a partnership between the two men (Jay Pridmore summarized the debate in _Chicago Magazine in 2008).
Of the three, the Louis Sullivan house fared the worst: nothing above the foundation remained standing. Just over a week after the hurricane, Blair Kamin wrote:
The destroyed bungalow was for two decades a vacation getaway for Sullivan, renowned for his Carson Pirie Scott store on State Street and his pioneering skyscrapers. A companion servant’s quarters a few paces away also was destroyed. Only a concrete pad indicates something sat there. From the bungalow’s veranda, Sullivan could gaze through overhanging white wisteria onto the waters of Davis Bayou, drawing inspiration for his urban high-rises from the rural paradise. Now the bungalow is a carpenter’s scrap pile, scattered as far as 100 yards away from its original location. Everything is gone except an urn planter, brick foundation pieces and the famous tree where, in a well-known photograph, Sullivan struck his iconic pose looking toward the sea. “This is like somebody coming into Independence Hall and burning the Declaration of Independence. It’s irreplaceable,” said Paul Minor, 59, a Biloxi personal injury lawyer who meticulously renovated the house after purchasing it in 1986.
Here are the tragic before & after photos. Some background on the Sullivan cottage can be found here, and many more images and information can be seen here in a 1905 article available on Google Books.
The other two, originally owned by the Charnleys, were badly damaged, but had the potential to be saved. As of early 2009, the two buildings had been stabilized, and the very early states of restoration were slowly grinding forward.
Hour Detroit published feature on the owners of the Turkel House in Detroit, Michigan. The current owners, Norm Silk and Dale Morgan, bought the house in 2006 and virtually save the house with a $1 million restoration.
The men say they had talked abstractly about moving to a smaller house, maybe something modern. But they liked their Palmer Woods neighborhood. One day, Silk drove by and spotted a for-sale sign. When they decided to buy, people called them crazy. They viewed the move as simply wanting to improve the house so they could enjoy living in a “cool place.” Along the way, it became their legacy.
“We’ve come to look at it like we’re caretakers of some important architectural piece, and it will keep going after we’re done with it,” Silk says.
A gallery of pictures accompanies the article. The photos highlight the extaordinary restoration, but also the feeling of light and space in the two-story Usonian.
The owners credit the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy with putting them in contact with Wright experts to help with the restoration; they will be attending the Conservancy’s annual conference in Cincinnati this September.
Descendants of Darwin Martin have donated six Japanese prints to the Martin House Restoration Corp. for display in Buffalo’s Darwin Martin House. More than just one-time furnishings of the Darwin Martin House, the prints were personally chosen by Frank Lloyd Wright for the home, adding an invaluable authentic touch to the restored home.
“It’s heartwarming,” said Mary F. Roberts, executive director of the Martin House Restoration Corp. “It’s fitting and appropriate that the Martin descendants believe the prints they have inherited from their parents and grandparents should be brought back to their grandparents’ home.”
It’s a sacrifice, but a willing sacrifice, by the family members, who come back frequently to visit the family home being restored on Jewett Parkway.
The six Japanese prints were donated by Darwin Martin “Jerry” Foster, a grandson of the Martins; Mark Armesto, a granddaughter’s husband; and Betsy Mudra, a great-granddaughter.
“The Martin family has set a wonderful example with these gifts,” said Martin House curator Eric Jackson-Forsberg. “It shows a real respect and love for the house, and an understanding of how important these prints were to the interior that Wright envisioned.”
The prints won’t be installed in the house until late Fall 2011, after the completion of restoration in July of that year. The donation dovetails With efforts to attract more Japanese tourists to the complex.
A New York Times weblog picked up the LA Times’s article on the price reductions on the Frank Lloyd Wright homes for sale in California. The NY Times blogger wrote this:
“One owner is considering a deal to move one of the houses to Japan.”
No, that’s not what the LA paper reported. What was reported was that the listing agent for the house claimed that it was a possibility. Yeah, maybe the agent is telling the whole, unvarnished truth. And, maybe that infinite number of monkeys have just about finished the complete works of William Shakespeare too. Both events are statistically possible possible, but not likely to be occurring at this moment.
Is the Millard House about to get crated off to Japan? God knows, I haven’t a clue. But I do know that the real estate bubble wasn’t caused by an excess of honesty on the part of real estate professionals.
Fun exercise: google “realtor rosey prediction”. See what I mean?
The Los Angeles Times has an article on the inability to sell the two Wright homes in LA that are on the market.
The agent listing La Miniatura claims that disassembling the house and moving it to Japan is at least a possibility (note it’s the listing agent, not the owner making that statement, and the possibility that he’s saying that simply to draw attention is not inconceivable).
After slashing the listing price over the last two years from $7,733,000 to $4,995,000 and not finding a buyer, Doe says he’s “talking to an international art dealer with Japanese art-collector clients who might be interested in buying the house.“
“With my position in the preservation community, I will probably be crucified for saying this,” says Doe. “But we have to consider all options. We moved the London Bridge to the Colorado River. Why couldn’t we move this house to Japan?“
The Ennis House is the other Wright currently for sale — its price has been lowered from $15 million to $7.5 million. Currently owned by a private foundation, the house has already had several million dollars of emergency restoration work done (partially due to the 1994 earthquake and torrential rains). The new owner will need to commit millions more to the house.
La Miniatura is in good shape having recently undergone a multi-million dollar restoration. The possibility of of one or both houses being acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been explored, but absent a donor with monumentally deep pockets,that isn’t going to happen.
One bit of good news is buried in the article. The Freeman House, though owned by the University of Southern California, has not been open to the public. USC is exploring the possibility of opening it to the public on a limited schedule.
As always, there is a gallery of photos with the article, with images of both La Miniatura and the Ennis House.
Later Update: The Chicago Tribune today has a related article on the inability of homes by famous designers in LA to sell. Homes by Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler have also gone unsold. Even in Chicago, the famous Ferris-Bueller-plummeting-Ferrari house, on the market for over a year, has had its price reduced.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple 38th Concert Series begins October 8. Ticket sales for the full series or 3-pick subscriptions continue through September 1, and single concert sales begin September 10.
New this year is “Dinner and a Concert” — for each concert, one nearby restaurant is offering a special discount before or after the concert — simply show proof of ticket purchase on the evening of the event. For the first concert by The WaiLin’ Jennys, Cucina Paradiso is offering 1/2 off a bottle of wine. Trust me, having dinner and a bottle of wine in downtown Oak Park is one of the great benefits of being a Wright fan — half off the wine makes it even better (or, at least easier to justify the second bottle of wine).
Frank Lloyd Wright designed Unity Temple to optimize acoustics, and by all reports, it’s a great place to listen to music. Ticket sales help to support the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation. Good music, good food, good wine for a good cause; Frank would approve.
