One of the unusual features of this building is that no structural steel will be used anywhere in the glass house. In detailing his idea, Mr. Wright pointed out that he plans to build this all-glass tower to a height of 18 stories and set a two-story penthouse on top of it for his own personal use. The walls of the building will be made of clear, heavy plate glass and the floors will be of concrete inlaid with a rubber composition to deaden noises. For decorative purposes, balconies and parapets, Mr. Wright proposes to use copper.

From the same issue: a giant bus with a landing strip and swimming pool. Admittedly unrelated, but cool.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1938 Dream House

And Time’s commentary is here

The 1938 Dream House was built — the Bernard Schwartz House in Wisconsin, which is available for overnight rentals and open for tours on selected dates.

The Mike Wallace interview have long been available for purchase, now they are available for viewing on the web. Mike Wallace donated tapes of his interviews to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and 65 of them, including the two-part interview with Wright can be viewed on the website. Subtitles have been added, and transcripts of the entire exchange are also available.

WALLACE: You said many years ago, that you would some day would be the greatest architect of the twentieth century. Have you reached your goal?

WRIGHT: Well, now I think I never said it.

WALLACE: Well, I’ve done a considerable amount of reading…

WRIGHT: (LAUGHING) I know.

WALLACE: by you and about you, this week. And I don’t think there is a good deal of doubt about the fact that over the years, you have said it not once, but many times. Maybe not… maybe not in that specific form.

WRIGHT: You know, I may not have said it, but I may have felt it.

WALLACE: Uh-huh. You do feel it?

WRIGHT: But it is so unbecoming to say it that I should have been careful about it. I’m not as crude as I am generally reported to be. I believe, like this matter of arrogance. Now what is arrogance?

WALLACE: What is arrogance?

WRIGHT: Arrogance is something a man possesses on the surface to defend the fact that he hasn’t got the thing that he pretends to have.

The alumni magazine for Yale had a very good profile of Vincent Scully, one of the (or maybe just the) most influential art historians.

Scully was a client of Wright’s (though his house was never built — too expensive) and among his students is Neil Levine, himself an important Wright scholar.

The article is terrific, and if you are not familiar with Scully, it is well worth the time to read — he is a fantastically entertaining character.

They decided to build a home outside New Haven. Scully went to Frank Lloyd Wright for the plan. He was caught up, at the time, in the heroic idea of the modernist architect driven by his artistic vision, and Wright seemed like the most heroic of them all. But Scully being Scully, he also noted borrowings in some of Wright’s early designs. “I asked him what he thought about Bruce Price — didn’t he
like that work he’d done at Tuxedo Park? He looked at me.
He knew exactly what I was talking about. He said, ‘Son, architecture began when I began building houses out there on the prairie.’” Scully cackles softly at the memory. “What a confidence man, what a crook! He was great, really.” In the end, Wright’s plan proved too expensive for a junior faculty member to build. Scully paid the fee, and then designed his own glass-walled house in the woods.

It was Iannelli, working with Wright on the Midway Gardens, who created the now iconic “sprites”. But, Wright being Wright, a photo of the sprites was soon published giving the architect the credit for their design, prompting an angry response from the artist. The two men eventually forged a compromise on how the work would be credited.

Iannelli died in 1965, and he was active in the Chicago-area through the mid-1950s, where, among other works, he was responsible for the sculpture of the Rock of Gibraltar on the side of the Prudential Building in the Loop.

Becker has written a great piece and it’s well-stuffed with images; read it.

Notre Dame’s Architecture Library slide collection has been made available on Flickr — more than 2,700 photographs. The images are from a pre-WWI collection, and include buildings in Europe, Asia and Central and South America. No Wright (in fact, no US) but worth a look.

The ones from Greece are amazing, especially the photos of the Acropolis and Parthenon (here you can still see one of the Frankish towers). Look at this one — you can see where I used to live in background. And this one kinda freaks me out.

The world really needs a good history of architecture blog. One of you should get cracking on that.

Most of the information was collected between 1969 and 1970 in a successful bid to win listing on the National Register of HIstoric Places. The original architectural survey cards are part of the database.

Here is the listings for the Meyer May House and the Amberg House 

Rates for rooms start at $1,000 a night.

“When you hear $1,000 a night for a room it might seem like a lot, but in the end it’s not about the price, it’s about the experience,” said Bill Carroll, a professor at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. “It’s such a unique destination. It really is about the cachet.” Carroll spent his honeymoon at The Plaza 41 years ago.

Nelda Johns of Dallas, who stopped by Saturday, recalled staying at the hotel as a child with her parents. Her husband Ken Johns said the place had gotten “a little dingy” before it closed. But looking around at the gleaming mosaic floors, sparkling chandeliers and gold-trimmed ceilings, he said, “They’ve done a nice job.”

A highlight of the restoration is a stained-glass ceiling, called a laylight, in the Palm Court dining room near the lobby. The laylight was replaced in the 1940s by a plaster ceiling, so “it hasn’t been seen in most people’s lifetimes,” said Sarah Carroll, director of preservation for the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which worked with the hotel owners to ensure that landmarked features were properly restored.

Glass shards and old photos were all researchers had to go on to recreate the laylight. Carroll called the result — a backlit yellow-and-green geometric design trimmed with roses — “a perfect crown for that room.”

The Palm Court serves breakfast, lunch, dinner and afternoon tea. A new Champagne Bar in the lobby offers cocktails, champagne by the glass ($25-$60) or by the bottle, with a top price of $3,350 for a magnum.

Hotel general manager Shane Krige said the renovated guest rooms “bridge the world between the old and the new” with flat-screen TVs, electronic key cards, iPod docks and digital touchscreens that let guests change lighting and temperature or call for assistance. Touches of old-fashioned opulence include 24-karat gold-plated faucets, mosaic bathroom floors and white-gloved butlers, one per floor, on call 24 hours. Guests of all ages can request an “Eloise” bubble bath, with milk and cookies.

The Plaza Hotel also includes residential units; all but one have sold.

The website Old Tokyo displays a number of these postcards, including several of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel interior and exterior views (even a bird’s-eye view that gives a sense size and mass of the building), a few with astounding colors. 

Spend time looking at the other sections of the site — you’ll see the clash of Western and Asian architecture that appalled Wright when he visited Japan, and you’ll see of the architecture that enthralled him on his first visit.

There are also images of the first Imperial Hotel, built in 1890 and lost to fire in 1923.

And the site has a small selection of maps of Tokyo through the decades (1899 - 1949), particularly interesting is one of the fire damage from the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 — the disaster that Wright’s Imperial Hotel famously survived.

If you like this site, don’t forget the documentary Magnificent Obsession, a fantastic film about Wright’s work and successors in Japan, with its own collection of amazing images for Japan. The film’s site also has links for further reading and a list of links to related websites.