Wright Chat

The wonderful thing about the great Midwestern silos is that they are a perfect reflection of their function. They do not, in my opinion, translate well into other functions. I've seen some that have been tortured into multi-family residences, and they just don't work at all well aesthetically. The ...

"... a dying rust-belt city and a horrible climate." The dying rust-belt city is a problem, but as the Norwegians say, "There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing." When I saw the house in 1985, there was a kitschy fountain or planter in the porch. Is that still the...

Laurie, you're absolutely correct. The wrong people stayed at Taliesin, including Olga, who should have gone back to the late Gurdjieff. If the likes of John Geiger, Curtis Besinger, Aaron Greene and Jack Howe had been in charge of the place, the history of what has come out of it since 1959 would b...

I think the Jester/Pfeiffer scheme is most telling. What Rattenbury did to Jester was inexcusable. It would not have been so tragic, but that Jester was a brilliant work, not run of the mill. The contrast of materials was most important, and the lack of that contrast in the constructed version is ha...

Before God's details, the basic technology has to exist. The current shingles might be equated to the Model T jalopy; future versions will be the Rolls Royce. If it doesn't work out to be economical and aesthetically acceptable, they will fade away.

I would come down in the middle. If the Pauson House had been unbuilt, considering the extent to which FLW worked on it, constructing it posthumously would not have bothered me. Yahara is somewhat different. Since it's such a simple structure, basically a garage for boats, the idea of building it is...

If it had been just about anyone else other than Elizabeth Gordon, I would have doubted it, but she was better PR than he could have got anywhere. And we all know how he was about PR.

This house was posted here some time ago with a plethora of photos. It's interesting, but not a very convincing FLW-style house.

This house, which has been posted on this site before, is based on the Dlesk Project, which was constructed in a slightly altered form for Louis B. Frederick (Storrer 376). It was apparently built at a much grander scale than either Dlesk or Frederick.

I would call that a major advance in the technology which could bring solar power withing range of the average budget. The look of it can always evolve over time.

The chimney extension looks silly. The fenestration of the hallway looks original, except for what appears to be an extention of the roof. It's hard to tell if that is screening or not, but I suspect it is. This is an example (in its original form) of how FLW could make something wonderful out of a ...

I dug up my files on All-Steel/Rand. They are a bunch of faxes from Taliesin which have never been published. Unfortunately, unless someone can get cleaner copies, many of them are too dark to read. And some that are legible are such poorly captioned sketches that it's next to impossible to determin...

First, examining Frank Lloyd Wright's "chop" will show that the double L consists of one upper and one lower case, which is not "Lincoln Lloyd" nor "Lloyd Lincoln" but "Ll," the abbreviation for Lloyd, as "Llw" is for Llewellyn, "Wm" for Wi...

After touring the Harry Adams House (1913), the last FLW built in Oak Park, Jack Quinan, who wrote the books on Larkin and DD Martin, said to me, "That's the house Darwin Martin wanted Wright to build for him." Which is to say, FLW went way overboard on the Martin opus; DD wanted something...

The late actor Dennis Weaver of "Gunsmoke" fame built a Reynolds-designed Earth Ship in the 80s in Colorado. It looked like a Malcolm Wells house without the charm. I believe it had over 8000 square feet of floor space, which doesn't seem too eco-friendly to me.