Wright Chat

Not familiar with this one at all. Fun to discover a new treat. That is some very precise masonry. The color scheme has a whiff of Olgivana about it. Are those steal windows? Did Wright use them often?

My other quibble is with the brick corners not cut to angle, but that would have been a tricky job.
What should be done with the plaster-board walls?
And who is the mystery architect?

Quite interesting. The architect clearly "got it" in terms of Usonian style. And terrazo floors throughout ain't cheap. The vertical boards didn't jump out at me so much as the oddly angular fireplace. This may have been an instance where observing the grid results in some odd and severe angles. My ...

I'm curious about your approach. With Sketchup you can build a model from plans and elevations, but you can also take a photo or drawing of a building and reverse-engineer a 3D version of the 2D image. So it would be possible to create a model just from the perspective drawing and perhaps compare th...

Was the Lockhard design built? It's terrific.

I believe there were some interviews done for Voice of America as well. I am not sure if any interviewer of the time really knew what they had on their hands. I wish just one would have asked him to describe his design process in detail.

What's interesting to me about this discussion of Rand is that we have this great presentation drawing and not a whole lot else. Where presentation drawings of half- or 3/4-baked schemes typically done? I'd have thought you'd only go to a perspective if a solid plan and elevation had been worked out.

In all the analysis of Wright's life, has anyone put together an authoritative list of his media appearances?

I believe there is perhaps a lot of unknown material out there, especially audio used for various radio interviews.

RE Metal, I have some drawings that provide more info on floor plan arrangements, but I don't know if they ever went to construction docs. That would be fascinating to see. I think the Rand design owes more to the Noble apartment project than the metal houses. The Foreman project...of Wa D.C. I beli...

I've always liked the chord the Rand drawing strikes. It's the sort of design...in his Fallingwater mode...that makes me want to crawl all over the structure. I could not find much in terms of alternate elevations and just some sketches of plans so it doesn't appear to have been thoroughly thought o...

No little triangle tables included. Were these tables always sold with the smaller tables or were the smaller tables a separate add-on item?

Rod, can you ID Wright's hand in various drawings? I assume the more sketchy drawings are his and that he would assign an apprentice to clean them up.

You could also make an argument that traditional Japanese architecture was a source of inspiration for Mies and for many mid-century architects who favored a post and panel design scheme.

How pre-fab'd were these homes? What elements were made in some factory and just put together on the site? It is strange that Wright never embraced more prefab possibilities akin to Schindler's post and panel system which made all kinds of sense to me. Wright could have had his army of apprentices b...

The kitchen and baths look very sleek and well done. The rest feels chaotic to me. Not a huge fan of angled beams. The living room fireplace is nice, but I can't imagine feeling cozy with three stories of airspace overhead. I think they picked too dark a stain for the wood.