Wright Chat

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that, after serious persons have done the preliminary evaluations that need to be done, the conclusion will be that it is not feasible to reproduce the building, and nothing will come of it.

Nothing new about money forcing common sense senseless. In 1958, the City of Los Angeles scotched a plan to build affordable housing in Elysian Park, and sold the land (which had been acquired by eminent domain) to the Dodgers Baseball Team, uprooting an entire community of low-income people in the ...

Molny's house for W. Ford Schumann is interesting in itself, but the article doesn't show the spectacular mountain view from the living room, with its hypotenuse of floor to ceiling, butt-ended slabs of glass, but for a small view taken from the deck. Not a house for those afraid of heights.

Jack has done fine work. His book on Madison is superb. It is not so much that I contest the dating of Lamp as would like to know how the confusion took place, and how, in spite of being obviously similar to the FLW 4-squares in plan, Lamp is noticeably different in detail and fenestration from them...

When FLW first arrived in the desert, he noticed how the mountains conformed, through millennia of erosion and settlement, to comply with the 60 degree angle, a revelation not to be found in the endless, soft flatness of the Midwest Prairie, as corroboration of what he already was doing by finding g...

The photo showing the storefronts along the side street was a revelation. That view, as far as I know, has never been published before. If the original building had remained, it would be a site worth visiting, compared to the bland replacement.

When Elsner bought the Bogk House, they looked into moving it to a more desirable location. There were movers who would have done the job, but in the end, they decided to leave it where it was. Lamp is tiny by comparison. If the lots to the SW are still vacant, it would be easy to move the house, an...

Move it.

I worked for Shamrock Holdings in the 80s. Roy Disney was a terrific boss.

Tom, there is a book on the Imperial, written after the hotel was closed and shortly before it was demolished. There are exquisitely drawn plans, elevations, sections, details, furniture showing just about everything one might want to know about the hotel ... but no plaque. Unfortunately, only capti...

Notice that there are no columns, filled or empty, supporting the stair tower. HABS seemingly took liberties with the plan, showing some of the columns as filled. Another inconsistency is that the plan shows the lower level as rebuilt for Sam; the original plan had 2 bedrooms symmetrically placed wi...

Matt2, the protracted construction time was due to a lack of funds. Sam, a jeweler, retired as soon as he was able to, but didn't take into account the cost of the house he undertook to build. By the end of construction, there was only one person making and installing blocks, a high school student. ...

One note on the Chusid claim of construction: The Freeman blocks, which were poorly made compared to Storer, could not possibly have supported a wall as tall as the stair tower, which is over 33', without the mortar/rebar grid. The weight would have crushed the blocks at the base. It is conceivable ...

"Didn't Lautner's replacements include some little projection of the horizontals, beyond the corner?" No. Early photos show small, cubic, wood blocks at the corners, which do not appear in FLW's working drawings. I suspect they were added by Lloyd when it became evident that the redwood tr...

A quibble: Quentin Beran writes: "Wright conceived the architecture of Taliesin West as a combination of elementary shapes which reproduced the volumes of the McDowell Mountains to construct a perfect aesthetic matching between the natural and the artificial." Is there a single word in tha...