Architects Patrick Mahoney of Buffalo and Anthony Puttnam, a former apprentice and the architect of Monona Terrace, are working on the project.

He [Wright] first envisioned a building of stucco and wood resting on a stone foundation, beside waters that never froze over, for year-round use by University of Wisconsin oarsmen. But the university declined to pay for the project, and it was shelved. A quarter-century later, Wright went back to the drawing board, revising the plan to make ample use of concrete, which had come into vogue during the interim.

The finished Buffalo incarnation has been described as “muscular-looking” by Anthony Puttnam, a Wright apprentice who teamed with Hamilton Houston Lownie architects to oversee construction. The structure will easily stand up to Lake Erie’s harsh winter winds and the Black Rock Channel’s fastflowing water.

“It fits the sport well,” said Ted Marks, a lifelong rower and president of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Rowing Boathouse Corp., the nonprofit organization that completed the project. “Plaster and lath were not an option on this site.”

The building, which faintly resembles Wright’s rectilinear prairie houses, including the Darwin Martin House, has poured-concrete exterior walls and hardwood floors and red oak trim throughout the interior. While the lower floor is a windowless boat storage facility with twin bays over pine planking, the upper level, with locker rooms separated by a center club room, is bathed in light pouring through custom-made leaded-glass windows.

The website for the building hasn’t been updated, but it does have some nice photos of the nearly-completed building. 

Here is a a set of 107 photos of the Massaro house on Flicker . Many are of the interior (and a few of the bing honkin’ boulder) and all of them are nice.

New York magazine has an article on the house too. While the article treads familiar ground (if you’ve been reading the Newsblog), it has the best prose description of the house that I’ve yet read — even if you’ve read all the Massaro articles, read this one too.

I went to every effort to make sure this was just as Wright designed it,” he says. From custom-making machinery to create the Wright-designed bas-relief copper panels that line the eaves of the house, to scouring the Internet and every other resource available to the modern obsessive (chimney caps and mahogany doors in Chicago, skylights from Santa Ana, California, the Connecticut craftsman who did all the Wright-designed doors, windows, and furniture), Massaro was intent on making a perfect Wright house. “We even had to buy a special die to cut the V-groove in the ceilings, because Wright’s V is a special size. That’s how far we went.”

April, 2000: Right place for Wright house?

Joe Massaro: “This is a long shot”

Frank Lloyd Wright: “I believe the fight for a work of art decorating the lake shore nobly should be pressed, to build anything else now will look like premature surrender.”

May, 2001: Couple get OK for design inspired by famed architect

Joe Massaro thought construction would take three years, but Thomas Heinz got this right: “Joe (Massaro) is unusual. He is not afraid of building this, and he knows how to get it done.”

July, 2004: A historic home rises for the first time

Three years later, the foundation is done.

September, 2004: Architect’s plan rising on Lake Mahopac island 53 years after it was designed

A few over-the-top comparisons to Fallingwater

June, 2005: House turns Wright

The cantilevered deck is finished, and Heinz makes a not-so-over-the-top comparison to The Beatles.

September, 2005: Software fills out architect’s sketches drawn 50 years ago

Construction “is expected to be completed this year.” Thomas Heinz talks about using software to visualize the house and fill in the plans.

May, 2006: The Wright time on Lake Mahopac

Oddly, Massaro claims he is “not always a great finisher”.

August, 2007: Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house on island in Lake Mahopac is finished

“He no longer has to imagine. He can step inside.”

There is also a gallery of photos and a a video tour of the house by Joe Massaro that includes the interior. That oft-spoken-of giant boulder — bigger than you imagined.

The House Beautiful movement began in the late 19th Century. Put simply, it was the philosophy that improving the built environment improved the quality of life. Adherents believed that coordination between architecture and interior design could inspire morality and citizenship. Before Wright, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, William Morris, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gustav Stickley and even Oscar Wilde (not sure what Wilde thought about the morality part) promoted the idea that art and craftsmanship had the potential to improve one’s life.

Frank Lloyd Wright encountered the idea when he arrived in Chicago in 1887 (Jane Addams was an enthusiastic booster of the idea) and he seized onto it with his characteristic zeal. Building beauty into the homes — and lives — of his clients was the key concept in every home Wright designed in his 70 year career.

The exhibit isn’t “Frank Lloyd Wright and the House Beautiful” simply because Wright is the best known, most popular architect of the 20th Century (and a near-guarantor of a wildly successful exhibit); Wright, as a life-long adherent to the House Beautiful philosophy dealt continually with the challenges of implementing it — in every decade from the 1890 through the 1950s. As American society (and Wright’s clientele) changed, technology advanced, new materials (like plywood) debuted, and highly skilled craftsmen disappeared, Wright had to adapt his methods, had to adapt, not his philosophy but his implementation. Wright’s work offers an extended look at the House beautiful movement, and how it literally transformed the American home.

The exhibit is organized thematically, not chronologically; the shifting forms of accessories, chairs or textiles can be seen grouped together, allowing the development of the House Beautiful ideals to be clearly seen. The items are well-chosen, with some things familiar to even casual Wright fans alongside the unfamiliar, surprising and quirky (I particularly loved the paper model house from a 1938 issue of Life magazine).

Some of the items displayed are are reproductions, others are shown only in photographs — understandable, given the condition and nature of these items. Since “Frank Lloyd Wright and the House Beautiful” is about an idea and not stuff, this isn’t a problem, or even a disappointment.

And there are some real gems in this exhibit, a few possibly once-in-a-llifetime treats for every Wright fan. Three drawings of of Wright’s Glass House Project of a 1945 issue of Ladies Home Journal fall into this category, and so do the photographs and dining chair from the exhibition house built for “Sixty Years of Living Architecture” (that building instantly became my favorite Wright house the moment I saw the photos). Wright’s textile designs were intriguing and his foray into licensed products simply must be seen in person to be appreciated — these won’t be to everyone’s taste, but, just trust me, you’ll want to have seen this stuff. And, lest we forget that Wright was a tireless self-promoter, a portion of the exhibit is given over to Wright’s efforts to not just build the house beautiful, but to publicize it — magazine articles, advertisements. Not shocking in today’s world and HGTV and the omnipresent Martha Stewart, but still a commercial side of Wright that most of us aren’t familiar with.

The exhibit is modest in size — a nice change from the monster events that are more like a triathlon than a cultural event. This exhibit is about an idea, not a long list of things . Its size encourages a slow pace, backtracking and thinking. And the arrangement fosters a real appreciation for the effort Frank Lloyd Wright poured into creating a beautiful environment — Wright may have been a genius, but his willingness to experiment, shift gears and discard old assumptions was just as important to his success, and “Frank Lloyd Wright and the House Beautiful” makes that abundantly clear.

New England has only one building designed by Wright (part of the price Northeasterners pay for great seafood, good sailing and L.L. Bean outlets), but the Zimmerman House is open for public tours.

If you are interested in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian designs, the website for the Willey House is good place to explore (especially the massing model). The exhibition House from “Sixty Years of Living Architecture” was demolished after the exhibit (it was built on the site of the Guggenheim Museum), but a house based on that building was built in Canton, Ohio and a nice set of photos can be found here and here.

So, take as a given that I accept a catholic range of opinions on Wright. But I have to point out this embarrassingly ignorant and juvenile review in The Boston Globe of the “House Beautiful” exhibit now at the Portland Museum of Art. At least The Globe calls it a review, even though the writer stops talking about the exhibit four paragraphs in, and then transforms the article into a personal statement on why Ken Johnson doesn’t believe Frank Lloyd Wright houses work well for the modern American family. Sadly, Ken Johnson is not even fractionally as clever as he thinks he is.

Did you know, for example, Wright’s homes are flawed because they lack sufficient storage space for the modern American lifestyle? How architect born two years after the end of the civil war, established in his career before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk and died a year and half after Sputnik flew could fail to design homes for the massive amounts of stuff that Americans began to acquire in the 1970s is a total mystery. Oh, yeah, H.H. Richardson is a total, freaking moron because he didn’t design Boston’s Trinity Church with a parking lot, and do not get me started on Daniel Burnham’s failure to predict fiber optics.

Less ridiculous, but more fun is this paragraph:

Wright thought the open plan reflected a more democratic, flexible, and modern way of life, but it can be argued that his designs reduce privacy and freedom by exposing all members of the family to relatively unimpeded surveillance and control. A family that does so much of its living in one room must be either unbelievably harmonious or very well trained by whoever holds the reins of power.

My beloved 1917 bungalow has a basically open plan — more open in fact than most of Wright’s Prairie houses — and we do every thing but sleep and cook in two big rooms that are open to each other. If you ever tell my wife that our family is harmonious or well-trained, be prepared to rush her to the nearest emergency room because she will have ruptured her spleen laughing.

And just plain confounding is this passage:

The second dimension of Wright’s program was a drive for aesthetic unity — what he called “organic architecture.” This meant that every part of the environment, from ceilings to carpets and drapes to dinnerware, should be the product of one stylistic system.

[ … ]

The bigger problem, though, is his idea that everything in the indoor environment should conform to one aesthetic. Wright thought that he was putting people in touch with nature by having all things great and small in the house reflect the same pattern, similar to the way the branching veins of a leaf reflect the branching structure of a whole tree.

Aside from raising the question of why the Globe hired an arts writer who has never heard of the Nineteenth Century ideal of the gesamtkunstwerk, I’d point to this, written by Martin Filler (a writer for the New York Review of Books, a publication that expects its art critics to know art):

In Tristan und Isolde, the solipsistic Wagner wrote, “Selbst damn bin ich die Welt” — “I myself am the world” — and like him, Wright saw his personal creations as universal. That is why the titanic achievement of Frank Lloyd Wright still communicates so directly to so wide an audience of admirers, who can find in him a separate, self-contained, comfortingly consistent, and pleasingly confident universe to inhabit.

Let us hope that if a major exhibit on the Vienna Successionists ever comes to Boston, Mr. Johnson won’t write the review (” … and that Josef Hoffmann, what’s up with him?”).

The original drawings that Massaro bought included a floor plan featuring built-in and stand-alone furniture, three elevation plans, and a building section. But Wright had only worked on the plans for three months and his designs were not complete. So Massaro hired architect Tom Heinz to fill in the blanks. Heinz, who runs his eponymous architectural firm in Libertyville, Ill., is considered something of an expert, having consulted on 40 Wright buildings, not to mention the Frank Lloyd Wright room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  ”The expression ’standing on the shoulders of giants’ comes to mind,” says Heinz of the process of constructing the Massaro house. In channeling the famous architect, Heinz relied on his knowledge of all of his projects — and on advanced technologies. To create a full set of construction documents he scanned the five available drawings into a computer and then used ArchiCAD software to translate the information into a three dimensional image. The software produced a database of viable dimensions for everything from the rooms to the concrete walls — and proved that Wright’s expansive design ideas were possible. “This wasn’t my design so I really needed to understand how everything was put together,” said Heinz. “I needed to work in three dimensions.”

See what happens when you don’t support public broadcasting?

“Did Frank Lloyd Wright Practice Feng Shui? NO!” (It’s more fun if you read the first part of the title with a breathless urgency and the last word with a Ted Stevens-like intensity) tells us that he didn’t. He didn’t, not because Feng Shui was (in the 19th and early 20th Centuries) a very obscure practice largely unknown outside of China before it was taken over by the New Age marketing machine, but because:

From the most general San Yuan perspective the construction project was ill-timed and poorly oriented, which (to the traditional Feng Shui mind) caused the interminable delays, disagreements, fistfights, litigation, and other woes that eventually doomed the project.

[ … ]

It could have been far worse, had the project proceeded as planned. Remember, the moat around Hollyhock House was designed to flow underneath the house, which makes any traditional Feng Shui practitioner shudder in horror. I wonder how the New Age practitioners handle that kind of design aspect, or the sixty-foot “crack-from-the-sky” walkway, or the U-shaped structure itself (how do you analyze that kind of floor plan with a McBagua?). And what of its many levels, the reflecting pool, the concave edges?

Of course, there is also a “Frank Lloyd Wright & Feng Shui? YES!” because he used water and built Fallingwater in a place with trees. Mostly this argument is made by defining Feng Shui so loosely that any home slightly less cluttered than mine would be a case study in good Feng Shui

I guess you aren’t supposed to notice that the qualities that make the Hollyhock house an example of bad Feng Shui are the same that make Fallingwater an example of good Feng Shui.

[Note: I don’t know as much as I should about Frank Lloyd Wright and Asian art — though there are people who read this blog who know much more, and if I am wrong, they won’t hesitate to e-mail me a virtual smack on the head. For the record, I love Asian art, particularly Chinese painting (compare Six Persimmons to any roomful of Renaissance masterworks you can imagine — Persimmons makes everything else look overwrought and slightly silly) but cheap New Age hackery is cheap New Age hackery however you dress it up]