The Weekly Wright-Up has a post on Wright’s unexecuted design for the family piano for the Darwin Martin House.
The unaltered piano was donated back to the Martin House in 2006 and has been returned to its rightful place in the living room.
Martin House Piano
Buffalo, Restoration/Renovation, Web Sites
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Nov 062011
According to this post on ArchDaily, we know that, based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s signature:
Big first name is an indication of ego and everyone knows Frank Lloyd Wright had a big ego. The squished together”Lloyd Wright” show that there were no family accomplishments of note that were of any importance to Frank and that this was his show and everything was about him (just ask any of his clients…)
There otta be a law — if you don’t recognize the name Uncle Jenkin, you can’t write about Frank Lloyd Wright.
Next week I look forward to ArchDaily’s article “The Phrenology of Great Architects”. I’m sure we’ll gain insight from reading the bumps on Wright’s skull.
Aug 242011
There’s a new website for the unbuilt George Berdan House near Ludington, Michigan.
The Berdan House was intended to be one of Wright’s unusual two story Usonian houses. Wright accepted the commission in 1945 and completed the plans in 1948 — the house was intended to cost $6,000 – 7,000.
(The website suggests that, for $1,695,000, you change the status of the house from “unbuilt” to “built”).
Cooke House
Eastern US, For Sale, The South, Web Sites
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Aug 212011
Curbed has a photo gallery of the Cooke House (which went on sale last year), a Usonian in Virginia, currently for sale for $3.75 million.
Even if you aren’t in the market, the website for the house is worth visiting. It includes Wright’s drawings and renderings, floor plan, a photo gallery and a video tour.
Aug 182011
I missed this one, but PrairieMod caught it: Madison.com posted an editorial published in the Wisconsin State Journal in August, 1951. It supported the building a Wright-designed bridge over the Wisconsin River, in the Wisconsin Dells. Wright offered to design the structure for free.
Maybe it’s because I’m sick and cranky this morning, but my favorite part of the editorial was the quote from Daniel Mead, an engineer, about the proposed civic auditorium for Madison.
A later post at PrairieMod has link to more information.
Jul 142011
Speaking of World Heritage sites, Wright in Racine has a post up on roof repairs on the Research Tower on the SC Johnson campus.
Jul 012011
The Weekly Wright-up had a post when I was gone on Wright’s use of the circle-in-square motif in his buildings, particularly the Martin House un Buffalo.
Not mentioned in the post is the most famous, and arguably most adept, use of the circle-in-square in architecture: the traditional Greek Orthodox church, including the most famous example, Hagia Sofia in Constantinople. In the Byzantine world, the motif had a profound theological meaning (though for the Byzantines, everything had a profound theological meaning).
Shortly before Wright designed the Marin House, Louis Sullivan completed the Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral in Chicago. Wright, late in his career, designed his own Greek Orthodox church, Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. Though there’s a lot more circle than square in the building, Wright is clearly referencing the traditional forms. Olgivanna Wright, from Montenegro (and as devotee to the Armenian mystic Gurdjieff and by her first marriage to a Russian architect) , would have been intimately familiar with the both the form and the symbolism of the circle in square.
PrairieMod posted a great batch of photos of Taliesin past.
May 112011
There’s a great find on the site Design & Desire in the Twentieth Centruy — a video from the Guggenheim exhibit “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward” on models built for the exhibit. One of the models featured in the video is the “exploded” Jacobs house that also appears in the current “Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture in the 21st Century”.
Follow the link . This is, without a doubt, the best thing I’ve linked to in months.
Don’t forget Mark Hertzberg’s post last month on the architectural models in the current exhibit at the Milwaukee Museum of Art.
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