It’s possible that I’ve posted this before, but Not PC has posted it now
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 of Frank Lloyd Wright are notable for Wright gleefully taking provocative positions on just about every topic Wallace could think to raise. Wright is clearly enjoying tweeking the collective nose of 1950s America and equally clearly, he is spinning a myth, creating on television a version of himself that to be remembered after his death.
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.
Landmarks Illinois has released their annual “10 Most Endangered” list. While no Wright buildings make the list, five of the 11 sites are in the Chcago-area, and one of the listed sites is the Michigan Avenue Streetwall, an area that includes both Louis Sullivan’s Auditorum Building that Wright worked on and where Sullivan had his office and the Fine Arts Building where Wright designed some interiors and also briefly had his office.
After 25 years of discussion with the city, local landmark designation was finally approved by City Council in 2002. Two current proposals, however, threaten the district’s character.
The former Chicago Athletic Association and YWCA buildings have been slated for rooftop additions, despite the limitations of height and scale enforced in landmark districts. The towers are designed to be set back from the historic façades, but call for considerable demolition of the existing buildings. Their height and mass would greatly disrupt the historic skyline as viewed from Grant Park and the lakefront. Should these projects gain approval from the city, they would set a precedent for high-rise additions in landmark districts and weaken the local landmark ordinance.
Landmarks Illinois is an active, 30-year-old, statewide preservation organization that counts the Reliance Building and the Marquette Building among its successes.
Because Minor League baseball is real baseball — the majors exist only to give the great minor league players the rewards they richly deserve.
Go Hens!
One day, the story of how, on the eve of my unemployment benefits expiring, I had an interview with the mayor of Toledo, Ohio — for a great, well-paying job — and then totally blew it will be very funny. But that day is not today.
Also, the estimate to replace my roof is $8,000 — in case you needed more evidence that that Universe is profoundly malevolent.
Though the mayor’s dog, famous in Toledo, did like me. but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a role in the city’s hiring process.
On Thursday, April 3 Robert McCarter will give a free lecture at the St. Louis Museum of Art, “The Houses of Frank Lloyd Wright”. The lecture begins at 7 PM.
Robert McCarter is a professor at Washington University and author of one of the best biographies of Wright in recent years.
Information available here
The event is sponsored by The Frank Lloyd Wright House in Ebsworth Park
Blair Kamin’s weblog, The Skyline, has a brief post on a recent meeting he had with Ada Louise Huxatble, architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal and author of a recent biography of Frank Lloyd Wright.
The topic of Wright does not come up, but there is news of a new book by Huxtable, arriving in November:
[A] collection of her columns from the Times, the Journal, and the New York Review of Books. She was promoting her book, of course, but I don’t mind telling you about it. To be published by Walker & Company, the book is titled “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change.” It will span from the early 1960s to the present, telling a story of architectural revolution and counter-revolution–the rise of modernism, the reaction of post-modernism, and how they led to the bold new architecture of today.
The board of trustee’s of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation has named a new chairman to replace Gerald Lee Morosco. The new leader is Fred Stratton, chairman emeritus of Wisconsin-based Briggs & Stratton. Morosco will remain on the board. two new public trustees were also elected:
Ronne Hartfield, noted Chicago author, poet and internationally recognized expert in arts and multicultural education; and Donald Fairweather, of Laguna Beach, Calif., retired president of WATG North America. In addition, Minerva Montooth of Spring Green, Wis., a member of the Taliesin Fellowship residential community of artists and scholars, retired from the board, having served since 2000.
Mr. Stratton, a member of the board since 2005, is also chair of Taliesin Preservation, Inc, the entity charges with protecting and restoring Wright’s Wisconsin home.
[ … ]
Ms. Hartfield was the former endowed executive director for museum education at The Art Institute of Chicago. A Rockefeller Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University, she also was the executive director of Urban Gateways: The Center for Arts in Education, then the largest private arts and education organization in the United States and winner of the Presidential Medal for the Arts. She wrote the biographical memoir, Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family. Fairweather was a student at Taliesin, now known as the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, from 1948-1952, when Mr. Wright was alive. He worked with several architectural firms in the San Francisco area before joining WATG, where he designed hotels and resort hotels worldwide. He was one of the founders and a board member of Taliesin Fellows, the school’s alumni organization.
Update The upgrade is finished, and it looks like I didn’t break anything too badly. I still have to work on the tags and categories, but I won’t get to that until later today and Monday.
If you have any trouble, let me know.
I will be updating the software running this site tomorrow morning. If it’s down for you, check back a few hours later.
I’m not very good at this stuff, so it’s possible I’ll hose the whole Newsblog contraption.
After the update, I’ll be moving to a tag/category organization system that (theoretically) will improve the site’s organization.
I’m not sure how some site features like the event calendar will fare in the update. I could do pre-update testing, but I’m seat-of-the-pants kind of guy (more accurately, I’m lazy), so we’ll just see how it goes.