This is the ONLY independent, unbiased source of information on the world's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and his work.

 This is the twenty-eighth edition of the FLlW UPDATE @ FrankLloydWrightInfo.com.

a supplement to the printed FLlW UPDATE, this update 24 December 2007

This site is maintained by William Allin Storrer, Ph.D., adjunct professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion now in a revised edition, and The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, a complete catalog, now in its third edition, revised.

Email should be sent to franklloydwright@storrer.com.

So you thought every Frank Lloyd Wright building had been found. Wrong. For the past decade, most often with colleagues Richard Johnson and Daniel Watts, have been following up on a statement made to me by Henry-Russell Hitchcock. He was working on the Foreword to the original The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, a complete Catalog as I was perusing his materials for In the Nature of Materials, and one day commented, "Wright would drive me through Evanston and Oak Park and Hyde Park and every so often he'd point to a house and say, 'I did that one but no one will ever know." Well, now we know. Over the next several months our researches will be revealed. Here is a taste of what we've found. Until we have completed research into the names of the first owners, only photos are shown of these three ASBH bungalows.

Of course, there have been alterations to each of these over some nine decades since the ASBH designs came out of Frank Lloyd Wright's office.

Materials in this & related web pages are copyright © MMVII by William Allin Storrer

Florida Southern College, view towards Nils Schweizer's Roux Library across the Water Dome pond; ferris wheel to the left, and light tower further left, with the Administration building at center left.

7:37 pm, the switch is thrown.

Power held to about 60% to keep viewers from getting soaked in the light wind.

Upwind.

The Florida Southern College Water Dome, S.255A.

69 years from design to finished working unit. This is the first Frank Lloyd Wright work

to be completed on the original site for the original client without alteration since 1966.

As you well can see, daytime with rainbow is much more interesting than plain lights at night.

Loving Frank, a novel by Nancy Drew Horan. New York; Balantine Books, 2007, 356 pages. ISBN 978-0-345-49499-3.
It has been a long time since I so enjoyed a book. Here is one that speaks truth, rather than rattle off facts.
Sometimes it takes a novelist, and fiction, to give us the truth that the facts presented by an historian or biographer fail to elicit. Biographers, of course, who, like Horan, never met their protagonist. Then, again, all biography is fiction, for it is written by people who use documents to make their points, their facts, often divorced from truth.
For any story about Frank Lloyd Wright is about divorce, the one Catherine wouldn’t give him.
This is Mamah’s story. Mamah Bouton Borthwick Cheney. So we see Frank through her eyes. This is not the Frank of his many biographers, nor of his own autobiography. It is not even the Frank I knew, a vain man but one of great charm with the pixie in him, a man of great humility yet with a sense of his real worth, but so theatrical that he was oft misunderstood as arrogant. Yet Horan does give some breath to Wright’s theatricality.
Missing is understanding of the whole Wasmuth Portfolio affair that sent Wright and Mamah to Europe. Wright was already living away from wife Catherine, but what was more important to him was his artistic crisis. The Portfolio was Wright’s farewell to Prairie, his epitaph to everything he’d built, for Prairie, though American, was not Democratic. Wright realized that he’d failed. He’d failed at marriage and at producing what he wanted in architecture. But he was proud of what he’d designed, and wanted it remembered even as he wondered how he could find that “democratic” that was missing from his work.
Horan is, however, hardly alone in her failure to see this in Wright’s taking off to Europe with Mamah in tow. Mamah gave Wright of herself, selflessly, and this helped him through the crisis of putting to bed everything he had done. His next major project was the largest file of drawings in his lifetime, the American System-Built houses; democratic to the core. That should have been the resonant clue. That he was busy designing, as well as rebuilding Taliesin, immediately after Mamah’s death, is another clue.
Yet let us not complain. In the pain Mamah experiences as she is kept away from her children, we see the complexity of a world not yet ready for Wright or Mamah or their ideas on love and marriage. Author Horan lived in Oak Park and knew the mythology surrounding Wright and Mamah. She is also a journalist, with the instincts that implies. Though at moments I could see words written by other biographers, some of which she acknowledges, transmogryphied into narrative, this is no fault when it works so well. Yet, sadly, she does not give credit to some who deserve it, even if she fails to recognize where she got her ideas. She gives credit to others who never knew Wright during the period about which she writes. So it goes. Nothing can ever be perfect when written by those who did not know, personally, their protagonist.

 SAD, but TRUE, there are those who violate copyright. There are those who have violated my copyrights to photos of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. Long ago a famous auction house used my photo of the Harper residence, S.329, to advertise the availability of that building.

More recently, a museum did a Wright show and copied plans of every building within the state. The plans were removed from the exhibit, but no penalty was ever paid, tho the director left shortly thereafter.

Now the Art Center at the Price Tower has apparently used my photo, cropped, of the Harold Price, Jr, residence, S.363, to advertise the availability of tours to that building. I was advised of this by a friendly reader of these online pages. He sent his photo of my photo, and there was no doubt of the source of what he sent. I contacted the people at Price Tower and was told I'd hear from them on this shortly. Is a year later, with several emails from me in between, "shortly."? Should they not pay the penalty fee for copyright violation?

For those traveling the country in search of Frank Lloyd Wright, the Duncan Residence, S.407.2, is now located in Polymath Resort Park on Usonia Drive in Acme, PA, a short stop from PA Tpke exit 91, the same you use for Fallingwater, S.230, and Kentuck Knob's Hagan house, S377. Take US 31 west at the turnpike exit to Clay Pike Road. 3.3 miles up you will find Dillon Road on the right. Right at the Y. The house is available for overnight stays. 877/833-7829.

Hagan residence, Kentuck Knob, S.377, 724-329-1901. Kauffman residence, Fallingwater, S.230, 724/329-8501

Others travelling in SE New York State or SW Connecticut and curious about all the brouhaha surrounding the Massaro attempt with Tom Heinz to build the Chahroudi residence (See S.346) might wish to consider the following:

MASSARO VERSUS WRIGHT

If only the dream of Mr Massaro had been properly realized, we’d all be praising his effort. Sadly, both on legal and aesthetic grounds, the Massaro house on Petra Island is not, and cannot be called, a Frank Lloyd Wright house. It could have been but, first Massaro agreed with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to say only that his building was “inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright” and second, too many compromises based on what Massaro wanted, not on what Wright gave him, deny a Wrightian claim.
Massaro might have hired a Taliesin Fellow to head the project, someone familiar with organic architectural practices from having lived with them over the decades since Mr. Wright’s death. Thereby he might have gotten more favorable press from the purists who would have been forced to look closely at the finished project before passing judgement. Further, one should not blame Tom Heinz for taking on the project. What architect would have passed up this opportunity to complete a Wright masterpiece, given also a fee worth two or three year’s earnings in one project? It is the compromises to which Heinz acceded that are unWrightian that should bother everyone.
Were I a consultant to the project, being generally recognized as an arbiter on what is Wright and what not as demonstrated in my two books, I’d have insisted on either a Taliesin or a Taliesin-trained Fellow to direct the project. That is the price one has to pay for authenticity. For instance, if Eric Wright had been the architect of record, who would argue the finished project? Eric, who worked in the Taliesin draftingroom under his Grandfather's direction (as well as under his father Lloyd Wright's supervision), might have produced convincing blueprints from the unfinished sketches with which Tom Heinz had to work.
So, what is wrong in the finished project?
Massaro has said that he didn't build the stairs from the cantilevered porch because they would descend into 3 feet of water. IF SO, THAT MUST HAVE BEEN WHAT WRIGHT WANTED, SO WHO IS MASSARO TO QUESTION WRIGHT’S INTENT? That stair was Wright’s referent to Fallingwater (S.230) which, in a moment of showmanship, the architect claimed would be trumped by the Chahroudi structure. No stair, no referent, no Wrightian authorship.
Massaro's 26 skylights are domed; Wright designed skylights that were flat. Massaro counters that flat ones leak. MODERN SEALANTS CAN PREVENT LEAKAGE OF FLAT SKYLIGHTS (much as modern technology can seal Wrightian flat roofs).
Margaret Folsom Leighey (S.268) railed against the National Trust after it moved her house to Woodlawn Plantation and positioned it differently than at its original site. Resited, the shadows didn’t fall as they originally did. Shadows from domed skylights would not fall the same as from flat ones.
Next might be listed the desert masonry (desert rubblestone wall), a construction process developed by Wright in which the embedded stones are flush with or recessed within the containing concrete. At Massaro’s house, many stones stick out, a clear violation of Wright’s intent.
In order to follow building codes, Massaro claims, he had to add 4 inches of Styrofoam insulation inside the support posts, making it impossible to embed the odd-shaped granite stones he harvested from the island and still keep the house from collapsing. DID MASSARO EVER CONSIDER GOING TO THE BUILDING INSPECTOR AND ASKING FOR A VARIANCE, GIVEN THE POSSIBLE HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS BUILDING WERE IT BUILT EXACTLY TO WRIGHT’S SPECIFICATIONS? “Frank would have changed this,” responds Massaro. “He would have had to.” HOW DO WE KNOW how WRIGHT WOULD HAVE CHANGED IT, IF HE WOULD? MAYBE WRIGHT WOULD HAVE ABANDONED THE PROJECT, OR COMPLETELY REDESIGNED IT.
Given Massaro’s combative attitude, utterly different from Chahroudi’s nature, I believe Wright would have redesigned it. He would have given Massaro a different house, still site-specific as the Chahroudi, but more in keeping with the different client’s character. Maybe it would have trumped Fallingwater, the Massaro house does not.

 

The Fellowship, the untold story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship
by Roger Friedland & Harold Zellman. 2006; Harper Collins, New York. 690 pages. $34.95. ISBN 13: 978-0-06-039388-5 or ISBN 10: 0-06-039388-2
a review & critique by William Allin Storrer

There is no need to go into detail on why I dislike what Friedland and Zellman have written about the Taliesin Fellowship, done at the expense of a Getty fellowship.

YOU DON'T JUDGE ARTISTS BY THEIR PRIVATE LIVES; you judge them by their works. The Fellowship is about private lives, not about the successes of Taliesin Fellows, both within and without Taliesin and Taliesin West, in architecture. These two authors even carry on some of Wright's own mythmaking, rather than correct it, namely the meeting of Wright and Olgivanna, never proven as Wright wrote it. They had access to Bill Marlin's papers, and certainly could have searched local Wisconsin newspapers, to ascertain the true birthplace of Wright, about which I've been public for the greater part of a decade.

If you want the full review, CLICK HERE.

SAD NEWS. S.005 and S.006B, the Louis Sullivan properties in Ocean Springs, MS, were totally destroyed by hurricane Katrina 28 August 2005. The James Charnley Bungalow, S.007, was gutted by the storm. The Guesthouse section, S.008A, of that building was largely destroyed. Your FLlW UPDATE webmaster was in Ocean Springs, Monday, September 26, 2005. To see images of Katrina damage to the Charnley site, click HERE.

The Wynant residence, S.204.5, already in serious disrepair but with some hope of being rebuilt, was gutted by fire the evening of Monday, January 9, 2006. For in image, click HERE.

Are you traveling the U S of A soon? If so, you may want to get maps updated with Interstate numbering of roadway exits now being used on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Phoenix's loop highways, and California's interstates. CLICK HERE

In this issue; continued items

Regarding S.092, the Mosher home

The Mitchell Residence, S.039, Wright with Corwin

FLlW Companion; CD-ROM & foreign language editions

Photo gallery; Marin County Hall of Justice

The Storrer Biography of Wright.

Not by Wright, but by the Taliesin architects

New exteriors in Oak Park

Not by Wright, no matter who says so

FLlW; A Gatefold Portfolio

Buildings undergoing major restoration

Ken Burns' FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

Derelict buildings 

Lloyd Wright in Chicago

USA travel to Frank Lloyd Wright sites

Gehry versus Gaudi

Wright buildings recently opened to the public

Organic architecture; living the future, rather than doting on the past; FOKSE

Other Wright-related sites worth consideration

Movies filmed in the Ennis house, S.217

Trophy books, or Why do Brits write about Wright?

Changes to printings of The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion since 1993 first printing

Jeanne Rubin's Intimate Triangle: Architecture of Crystals, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Froebel Kindergarten

The Charnley House reviewed by Peter Reidy Lightscreens; The Leaded Glass of Frank Lloyd Wright, reviewed by Dan Watts
Wright in Racine: The Architect's Vision for One American City, an editorial 34 other Book reviews combined into a single page
To go to an item, click on it

“A House Without a Care in the World”

Fallingwater Rising by Franklin B. Toker
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004
ISBN 1-4000-4026-4

Reviewed by Peter Reidy

You know that isn’t true. It was in trouble structurally before it was built, and chronically ever since, almost fatally in the 1990s. This last was one of the architectural stories of the decade, and historians have often enough chronicled its earlier troubles. Just the same, you know what Toker means. By contrast to earlier writers on the house, most notably Donald Hoffman and Edgar Kaufmann Jr., the clients’ son, Toker focuses on social history and convinces us that the story and its characters are worthy of the architecture, almost the matter of a novel or a movie. Will the aging architect, once the cynosure of his profession in America, Europe and Japan, come back from years of idleness, or will he remain a has-been, his creative peak decades behind him? Will the client show himself once more the master reader of public taste, or will he be expensively wrong for once? Just what is the story with father and son, so different but rivals just the same?
While some of the book’s conjectures are silly (more on this later), others are intriguing. Placing Fallingwater in architectural history, Toker notes, as others have, a kinship to Neutra’s Health House for the Lovells in Los Angeles, which Fallingwater supplanted as the world’s most famous modern residence. The difference he points out is that the later building does what its predecessor only pretends to do. Its cantilevers are real, not hung from the frame on invisible cables. Its bolsters hold up the house itself and not just a detached swimming pool. He finds references not only to the International Style of the day, as others have, but to the area’s industrial and hydroelectric past.
Toker’s central quest is to rescue Edgar Sr., the colorful retailer, from what he considers unjust neglect. For over forty years his son has gotten credit as the de facto client who discovered Wright and delivered his parents to him, whereupon they provided the money but otherwise stood aside. Kaufmann père was, to the contrary, an enthusiastic, hands-on builder who had been putting up buildings and publicizing them for years. This leads to the question, why did he choose Wright after cruising through neoclassical as a philanthropist, neo-Norman for his home and art deco in his store? “He was a merchant, and that is what merchants do: jump from style to style as the market demands.” He made his fortune by seeing where public taste was going and getting there first. He hyped Fallingwater more energetically at first than Wright himself. (Toker makes an interesting distinction between hype, which one can orchestrate and buy, and buzz, which happens spontaneously or not at all.) A decade later The Kaufmanns wounded Wright by switching to Neutra for their Palm Springs house, just in time for the ascendancy of mid-century modernism. He was an esthete, but he was first and always a showman, never forgetting the the publicity value of his own life. In yet another interesting background story, we learn that department stores once did many of the jobs that museums and movie theaters have subsequently taken over. The Armory Show, which introduced modern art to the United States, toured retailers’, as did Wright’s Broadacre City model. Art had been a means to the end of advertising long before the 1930s.
Wright had built almost nothing in over a decade when the Kaufmanns approached him. One big, public commission after another had fallen through in California, Arizona and New York. The action, so everyone else thought, was with the Europeans rather than with a man who had made his mark by 1909 and not done much since. In the annus mirabilis of 1936, with this house, Johnson Wax and the the first Usonian, for Herbert and Katherine Jacobs, Wright came back to the top and has been there ever since.
This is one received story Toker doesn’t challenge; he retells it enthusiastically. Some of the others, though, he recounts in a new light. Students of Wright will have heard the story of his doing the drawings in a few hours, after inviting Kaufmann out to Taliesin to see them. Having tracked down several eyewitnesses, finds this true in outline, but by examining the drawings and their erasures, he has come to the conclusion that the architect had been drawing privately for months. He even reconstructs what the first scheme might have looked like. It’s a handsome house that would make any client and almost any architect proud, but, in Toker’s phrase, it doesn’t sing. Wright only later had the insight to extend the upper balcony a few feet beyond the one beneath it, turning a weekend house into an icon.
A few inaccuracies manage to get through. The “ugly pier” (two of them, actually) that marred the appearance of the Tomek house Illinois for so long is not there “to this day.” They both came out in 1992, a welcome change evident to anyone who drives by. The underlying point, though, is sound: Wright’s structure, not for the last time, was inadequate to the weight he put on it. Brendan Gill speculated in Architectural Digest, not that Edgar Jr. was expelled from the Fellowship for his homosexuality but rather that he left because of an unappily-concluded love affair. The fact that the book cites the infamously inaccurate Gill at all is a symptom of the its problems.
A bigger issue than the occasional inaccuracy is Toker’s overeagerness to reach the conclusions he wants. He leaps over too many inferential gaps and cantilevers his conclusions beyond what the underlying data will support. If a conjecture might be true, it becomes so for the purpses of the story; if the evidence doesn’t contradict a theory, it counts as evidence for it. For example, he sees the elder Kaufmann’s efforts to make his house famous as a reaction to the genteel but pervasive anti-Jewish prejudice of the day. Old-money Pittsburgh was happy to cut mutually-profitable deals with the Jews, but they couldn’t enter their clubs. Tennis matches were a special case, because guests didn’t actually go inside. This is an interesting speculation, but the book presents no hard data to make us think it’s anything more. The Kaufmann it presents is in any case a man too busy, and having too good a time, to pursue even a justified grudge. On pp. 114 – 115 alone are five occurrences of “would have” and one each of “could not miss,” “might have,” “was surely,” “probably knew,” “is a safe bet,” “may well have” and “chances are excellent.” All of this comes of an attempt to summon up an imaginary social connection to the patrons of modern architecture in Los Angeles – Aline Barnsdall and the other Wright clients, and Phillip and Leah Lovell. Once again, we see nothing like a letter, photo or eyewitness account, nor does Toker quite say that he has such evidence, but he loves the idea. The most egregious psychologizing comes in his treatment of the steps that lead from the top floor of Fallingwater (Junior’s rooms) down to the west terrace one floor below. In an elaborate and quite undocumented account, Toker reads these steps as Wright’s symbolic attempt, hopeful but in vain, to promote closeness between the son upstairs and his father below. To do this he has to ignore a much simpler explanation: the steps are there to give the top floor access to the terrace. The alternative is to go down an interior staircase to in the opposite direction, double back along the gallery and cut through Edgar Sr’s room. If one insists on bringing Freud into it, the point of the floorplan is exactly to the contrary. The stairs enabled young Edgar to get to the terrace without meeting his father.
The inconsistencies inaccuracies Toker finds in the son’s recollections are the kind that might creep into anyone’s over the decades, not proof of a systematic campaign of deception. The fact that a researcher as diligent as Toker has no other explanation of the initial connection is a reason to respect Edgar Jr’s version, not to dismiss it.
And so on and on. Read this book for entertainment. Read it skeptically for enlightenment. If you’ve never been to Fallingwater, read it before you go, but don’t throw away your copies of Hoffman Kaufmann Jr.


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Gehry REDUX, again

The images above are of CSAIL, the acronym given Frank Gehry's building for MIT. Finding that students didn't think MIT sufficiently avant-garde, MIT commissioned Gehry to do them a building in their overcrowded part of Cambridge. What the got looks a lot like a full box of children's colorful toys, without the box. Students hate it, largely because the building was designed with no concern for how spaces would be used. Rooms were projections are required routinely cannot be darkened, the odd-shaped windows denying any standard way of covering. The photo below is seen through a glass wall, a floor above the only open access to the ledge, by ladder. Why place a ledge there anyway? And so on. Yet this sculptor is still hired by people who think he is an architect.

Many who have seen the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles have been overwhelmed by its architecture, and thus may not be listening critically to its sound. We now have an independant view of its acoustics and other problems which could make it a white elephant within the decade. The information comes from someone who travels with orchestras, knows how they sound in great halls such as Boston Symphony Hall, Detroit Orchestra Hall, Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Louis Sullivan's famed auditorium in Chicago, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Gammage Auditorium in Tempe, Arizona. Here are his comments, edited only for brevity.

The building is a design Gehry had worked on for another project pre 9/11. Thus, it is a security nightmare, with entrances on all sides of the building. Whenever a visiting orchestra or other group, such as the Israel Philharmonic, is playing, the entire city block has to be cordoned off by a massive police contingent. In the long run, the cost of this will be prohibitive. Next, the underground parking garage has to be closed two days before such an event. A van filled with explosives equal to what were set off in the early nineties in the World Trade Center would level the Disney to the ground. Here is further loss of revenue. Finally, this old design of Gehry, sort of "pulled out of his pocket" when Disney coughed up the funding, has each ticket-price section of the hall physically separated from other sections. Thus an inordinate number of ushers need to be hired during concerts, again raising operational costs. My advisors suggest that a decade will speak the death knell for the building unless some outrageously wealthy donor kicks in multi-millions on an annual basis. The Gehry structure in the park in Seattle has already lost the upkeep funding of its original multi-millionaire, so the prognosis is not good. All this, and the acoustics are bright, not warm. Musicians often cannot hear others a few desks away, so ensemble can be ragged, yet the turning of a page on stage projects into the auditorium. When a truly large orchestra plays fffff, the sound breaks up, overloading the hall.

MORE . . .

The following article appeared in Volume 4, Number 15 of the Classical NEW JERSEY Society Journal

The Myth of the Walt Disney Concert Hall

Should you end up in L.A. ...

Sunday March 28

By A. Michael Noll

The Walt Disney Concert Hall opened last year as the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Designed by Frank Gehry, the hall has been acclaimed by critics for its fine acoustics and also for its impressive and novel architecture. Although the architecture is indeed impressive and the hall looks quite nice, the acoustics are not good, . . . CLICK HERE to continue

Many visitors to this site have wished for a bio of its webmaster, who is the author of The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, a complete catalog and The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion (in English, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. There are two such bios available, one at www.storrer.com/billphd and the other at JetSet Modern.

There is really only one way to "view" Wright if one wishes to gain an understanding of his genius. One must go into the buildings. Standing outside and look at the building, however much that may reveal what is in side (as good organic design will), is a fruitless pursuit. There are now a few buildings by Wright that are available for rental by the week or weekend, and a bed & breakfast, as well as several sites that may be visited for a small fee on a daily basis. CLICK HERE for a listing.


"It is possible to understand even as one cannot emulate. This is why Wright has so few followers and no true successors. Understanding is not enough."This isthe ONLY independant, unbiased source of information on the world's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and his work.

Herewith some answers to the challenge I made to all academics who claim to be experts on the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright or who otherwise teach courses on the work of the master. They were to demonstrate their knowledge or admit they were deficient. From Cambridge to Madison, many failed to prove their worthiness. Here is a site with items under consideration as possibly by Wright. Weigh in with your conclusions, either yes, or no, or possibly, and why. No excuses. If you want more information, email for what is available. What is shown should, however, be sufficient. CLICK HERE.

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ALL OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT IN ONE BOOK

FIELD GUIDE & CATALOG

Color photos for all extant structures

Published November 2002 in a softcover and a limited edition hardcover. The hardcover will not be reprinted when sold out.

For a view, Click HERE

 

This is the ONLY independant, unbiased source of information on the world's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and his work.

"Shaking Houses out of his sleeve,"

the hidden Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright

or how Wright moved from Victorian to a "Democratic American Architecture"

To view this presentation, CLICK HERE

ON THE MISUSE OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

What is art? What is art in architecture, and why is the presentation of Frank Lloyd Wright to the public failing?

Somewhere around the turn of the century (19th to 20th) Joseph Conrad wrote that art is "a single-minded effort to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe."

Wright did that in his architectural designs. His was not a company, but a single mind. Yes, occasionally he worked with other great minds, but they had to satisfy his idea. That idea was of a whole, an entire environment, from outside to inside including its furnishings.

Yet Wright-based institutions, notably the bookstores attached to Wright sites, market Wright in parts, thus shouting to the visiting public that Wright's ethos was wrong. Instead of marketing a few, well-chosen books that present Wright's work or his life in the inspirational beauty they represent, the biggest Wright bookstores market anything with the name Wright on the cover, even books filled with incorrect or incomplete information about Wright (Many Masks), his work (The Frank Lloyd Wright Encyclopedia) or books that are now outmoded (Hitchcock's In the Nature of Materials which, however much it was the standard reference in 1940, now presents but one-sixth of Wright's built work).

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This is the ONLY independant, unbiased source of information on the wrld's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and his work.

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF A DEMOCRATIC AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE

Given that, as a child, Frank Lloyd Wright was surrounded by pictures of great architecture selected by his mother Anna, it should hardly surprise us as to why Wright chose to be an architect, to practice the Mother of all the Arts. But what kind of architecture? Wright's goal was a Democratic American Architecture, and democracy starts at home, around the hearth. Initially his designs were eclectic, Victorian, but in seeking how he could make that derivative architecture more democratic and more American, he rejected pretty Victorian decoration and looked for organic ornamentation and found interest in rectilinear forms. This led to his abstraction of the American midWestern prairie into the low, ground-hugging Prairie designs, regularized somewhat democratically on a unit system creating a grid for the plan, and freed from the box by the cantilever. This was American, not yet truly democratic. Asking what if he changed this or that, varying pinwheel and four-square plans in an endless variety, did not make Prairie any more democratic, so he rejected Prairie and went into the wilderness, tying Prairie neatly off with the Wasmuth Portfolio. While living on large commissions, Midway Gardens, the Imperial Hotel, Barnsdall Park, he worked on the American System-Built Homes project, which was realized in part in a project by Sherman Booth and in prefabricated versions for Arthur Richards, which failed due to the First World War. Then, in the Twenties, Wright conceived of his Textile Block method of construction, inexpensive yet beautiful, Democratic as he understood the concept. Four houses, each abstracted to its site, followed, and another in Oklahoma. Then Arthur McArthur bastardized Wright's Arizona Biltmore, and the Great Depression killed other projects. Wright retrenched, substituted cheap wood panels where he would have preferred masonry, and created his second generation Usonian house, single-story to suit the Prairie. Now, abstracting from the site, asking "what if" with each design, he fit home after home in a dizzying array of geometric grids, squares, rectangles, triangles, diamonds, even circular segments, to whatever site the client presented. Returning to masonry after the Second World War, he went back to Textile Block in his Usonian Automatic designs, then even followed the step he took to achieve his 1936 and later Usonians by turning the all-masonry Automatic into the Erdman Pre-fabs. Here in his Usonian designs from 1923 to 1959, fully half his architectural career, is the hidden legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright, Democratic American Architecture, each individual, each abstracted to its site.

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This is the ONLY independant, unbiased source of information n the world's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and his work.
Regarding BUILT or NOT BUILT.

When we have no reliable photographic evidence together with a plan from the archives of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, how do we know if a work was built in any form, or as designed, nor not at all ? This is important regarding S.132, S.143, S.123, S.124 and S.223, among others. This is all about "built works that weren't!" In April 2000 I went to Damietta and the east branch of the Nile delta, to check out the cottages at or near there. Here is a genearal statement, and a report on the Egyptian cottages. Click HERE.


REGARDING ARTHUR McARTHUR's ALTERATIONS TO

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT'S ARIZONA BILTMORE HOTEL (S.221)

Had Arthur McArthur designed the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, he'd have been the second greatest architect of the 19th century. Click HERE to see what the NEW YORK TIMES missed while I was away in Europe.
If you are travelling the U S A in search of Wright, click on this

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Frank Lloyd Wright; A Gatefold Portfolio

Balthazar Korab is one of the finest architectural photographers to have found Frank Lloyd Wright's work a suitable subject for his camera's lens. Like your FLlW UPDATE editor, he is a Michigander. Barnes & Noble has published Frank Lloyd Wright; A Gatefold Portfolio, thirty-two pages of Gatefold pull-outs with sixteen full-color renderings. Text is by Robin Langley Sommer. Photographs, of course, are by Balthazar Korab. Plans and additional photographs were provided by your FLlW UPDATE editor. If you don't have the CD-ROM of The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion, then this portfolio will reveal Storrer photography in color to you. Between Korab and Storrer, you will see sixteen Wright sites with drawings by Wright and dozens of awesome photographs.

To learn more, or to order online from Barnes and Noble, the publisher, click HERE.

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Other Recommended Wright sites on the web

There are very few Frank Lloyd Wright web sites that are truly useful. Many are advertisements for real estate that "looks" like a Frank Lloyd Wright building, according to the real estate agent. Others, like the NASA site, are graphically interesting, but seriously outdated (the NASA site uses the "Bruce Radde" list of Wright structures published in Raeburn and Kaufmann's Frank Lloyd Wright; Writings and Buildings, which was actually assembled by another Taliesin fellow and of which about every third listing is incorrect). One site is from a Boston College professor who offers a portfolio of perspective uncorrected images of buildings. My standard for individual listings is that the site manager always identify built Wright structures by the Storrer catalog number as given in The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion together with the full site name as therein listed. Indices to other sites are judged by how comprehensive their listings and how easy it is to navigate them. With over 700,000 sites that come up in a general search of "Frank Lloyd Wright," it seems absurd to advise of any as being special. PBS has opened a site, but it is too reliant on the faulty two-part Ken Burns Frank Lloyd Wright Biography.

TO ACCESS ANY OF THE FOLLOWING DIRECTLY, CLICK ON THE HIGHLIGHTED TEXT

Anyone reading this and thinking their site should be included, please email me accordingly at < franklloydwright@storrer.com>

Here is my latest URLs for Frank Lloyd Wright and related information;

<http://www.leighmgt.com/stevesheet/wright.htm> is Steven Leigh's links to Wright sites

<http://www.wrightnowinbuffalo.com> is the Buffalo Niagara Convention & Visitors Bureau web site devoted to Buffalo's incredible wealth of architecture, art and heritage attractions. The site features detailed information on the city's outstanding collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.

<http://www.steinerag.com/flw> is the Steiner Agency's private site that chronicles nearly 1,400 books, periodicals and items related to our favorite architect. This site includes nearly one thousand internet pages covering Wright's published work beginning in 1895 through recently published work.

<http://www.robertgreen.com> is Mathew Green's site about Aaron Green's architectural practice

<http://www.jpvanherik.com> is Jason Paul van Herik's site showing his organic architecture in Japan.

<http://www.artbooks-ltd.com> is the Starosciak site for Wrightiana

<http://www.midglen.com/newsletter> is the site for copies of the Taliesin Fellows Journal

<http://www. earlnisbet.com> is the site for Nisbet Associates and their organic architecture

<http://pathfinder.com/Life/dreamhouse/taliesin/taliesin.html> shows John Rattenbury's dreamhouse

<http://hickmandesigns.com> presents designs by architect Hickman that are influenced by Wright

<http://www.taliesin-architects.com> takes you to everything related to the Taliesin Architects

<http://www.taliesinpreservation.org> is the connection to Wright in Spring Green, Wisconsin

<http://architecture.about.com/arts/architecture/library/bl-wright-list.htm> is Jackie Craven's listing of Wright sites

<http://www.geocities.com/allwrightsite> is Chris Miller's comprehensive index of the good, the bad and the ugly in Wright web sites.

<http://www.douglasanders.com> presents late-breaking information on Taliesin and the Frank Lloyd Wright world

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