Wright Chat

Bravo, Rod.

UNESCO listing is about like the NY Times and its top 10 "bestseller" books of fiction and non-fiction, which include junk like Dr. Phil, and imply that everyone should be reading the same stuff at the same time.

My reason for thinking the Marin County building goes back to Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building of 1892-93 is supported by the fact that Wright's entrance arch for the V.C. Morris shop is largely swiped from H. H. Richardson's north entrance arch (servants' entrance) at the Glessner house. Ol...

No need to go back to the ancient Roman aqueducts for the Marin County Buildings. Just think of the long view of Adler & Sullivan's Transportation Building at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, in Chicago, conceived by Sullivan while Wright was his chief draftsman. Or, a more proximate source...

Now that the Sturges house in Brentwood is for sale and in the news, it should be noted that Wright didn't get the cantilever right on that one, either. Luckily, John Lautner saved the day by inserting steel beams. Wright's all-wood cantilevers in the prairie houses were very good, either. No use pr...

Can't imagine Curtis Besinger being very "pleased" with these cheap and cheap-looking chairs, which look like they came from Popular Mechanics or some such home-workshop source. Curtis was a man of high taste and discrimination.

From the Chicago Trib -- hard to tell what this apprentice learned from FLlW:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/classifie ... llery.html

Thanks, Rod, for drawing my attention to the Gunning House. It looks like a beauty, especially with that low profile on one elevation. As to the discussion of getting an exact list of surviving Wright buildings, it seems to me that the Conservancy since its inception has failed, instead, to consider...

Such a relief to see the clean simplicity of a good Neutra house after looking at that awful and heavy-handed house in Ann Arbor pretending to be Wrightian! Why even bother with such crude imitations--or, rather, burlesques--of Wright's work?

What's wrong about the first blueprint (Fallingwater) is that it represents and early study of the guest house and connection to the main house: Note that it shows the bridge over the drive entering the main house at the third story, although this was changed to make the link occur instead at the se...

As to Rod Grant's comments on the decline of Wright's work in his old age, I recall asking H. R. Hitchcock why he didn't bring his great book "In the Nature of Materials" up to date--to which Hitchcock quickly gave three reasons: there were some copyright problems; he would have to deal with the fea...

In the group portrait of fifteen men gathered around Wright, Mosher is at the right, hunched below Tafel (who has the curly hair). In a variant photograph, with only three men at the drafting table with Wright, Mosher is standing right behind the master--with blond hair and puffy lips. He looked muc...

Thanks to Peter for the Harwell Harris interview--such a decent man, not in the least full of himself or eager to impress others, but modest, well-informed, and quietly thoughtful. (So unlike Neutra!)

As to pronouncing Marion Mahony's name, I hazard to correct Rod Grant, who's right about almost everything, but H. Allen Brooks conspicuously stood up at a symposium on Griffin/Mahony at the University of Illinois, around 1998, and protested against the affected MAHony pronunciation. Brooks said tha...

In an early photograph of the Robie house, FLlW carefully had the trunks of three elm trees painted-out so as not to interrupt the lengthened horizontal lines and planes of the south front ... Today, from the viewing platform so kindly provided by Rafael Vignoly in his Booth business school across t...

The basic trouble with the addition to the Sondern house is that it left the place with TWO living rooms. Some years ago, I visited the house with the historian Allen Brooks, and was interested to find that the owner, Richard Stern, favored the original, and smaller, living room. Stern bequeathed th...