MY OWN PHOTOS... WALKER RESIDENCE, CARMEL-CALIFORNIA

Roderick Grant · Post by **Roderick Grant** » Sat Jun 22, 2013 1:27 pm

Look at those bricks in the Wingspread fireplace. It looks like Johnson got culls from Jacobs, rather than the other way around.

Rood · Post by **Rood** » Sat Jun 22, 2013 5:50 pm

Ron ... I love the Wingspread balcony fireplace, but when I was there it appeared never to have seen a fire .... and your photo suggests that the same logs I saw years ago are still waiting for something to set them ablaze. Are you able to enlighten us?

Reidy · Post by **Reidy** » Sat Jun 22, 2013 8:37 pm

Murray Grigor's documentary The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright has a brief sequence of the HH fireplace in use. Virginia Kazor, the curator at the time, explained that among the conditions were buying an insurance policy and hiring a firefighter (or was it two?) from the city for $80 per hour.

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Sat Jun 22, 2013 9:36 pm

We're talking about the upstairs fireplace shown above, not the main fireplace in the living room ?

SDR

dkottum · Post by **dkottum** » Sat Jun 22, 2013 11:09 pm

I would imagine the logic of those tall fireplaces is that if you lit them at the top of the vertical wood stack, they would create a draw and burn harmlessly down to the bottom?

Or is this another case of "form and function are one, but when function gets in the way of form, to heck with function", a description of FLW's architecture by Brandoch Peters I seem to recall.

Nonetheless, these fireplaces are beautiful as they are designed, wouldn't want to see it any other way.

doug k

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Sat Jun 22, 2013 11:37 pm

I wonder if anyone is working on a study of the fireplaces.

A complete list, with images -- at least some in color -- with material description, and (where possible) anecdotal evidence ? If he built 532 structures, most of them with fireplaces, and there were two to a page, it would make a 280-page book, perhaps. A sprinkling could be full-page images (Martin; Fallingwater); there could be some drawings, perhaps cuts from original sheets. Someone to do an intro . . .

SDR

RonMcCrea · Post by **RonMcCrea** » Sun Jun 23, 2013 9:05 am

There is a little fireplace book. Carla Lind's Frank Lloyd Wright's Fireplaces is one in a series of small-format books on aspects of Wright design that she produced for Archetype Press in the 1990s. It's not the comprehensive book that SDR suggests but it has good selection in 55 pages of color and B/W photos of fireplaces from every period.

On another question, I have no idea whether the Wingspread fireplace with the tree-length birch logs standing in it has ever been lit. I certainly hope not.

Roderick Grant · Post by **Roderick Grant** » Sun Jun 23, 2013 1:06 pm

It would take more than 280 pages. Most of FLW's houses have more than one fireplace, some (Taliesin & T-West excluded - how many in each?) have as many as seven. Anderton Court has 8, Hollyhock, Oboler and Ennis 3, Millard, Storer and Freeman 2, one only in Sturges and Pearce, so L A alone would take up 25 pages.

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Sun Jun 23, 2013 2:25 pm

Thanks. Yes, that's so. I certainly would want every Fallingwater fireplace; as a suite, they're marvelous . . .

SDR

wjsaia · Post by **wjsaia** » Thu May 02, 2019 7:40 pm

Attempting to bring the thread entitled "MY OWN PHOTOS... WALKER RESIDENCE, CARMEL-CALIFORNIA," initiated by "guanche," up out of post-outage shadows . . . we'll see.