Wright Chat

The house travelled all over the country with a show called "In The Realm Of Ideas." I saw it in D. C. where it was not very well sited, just sort of jambed into a tight space. One of the sponsors was Kohler, a Wisconsin manufacturer of plumbing appliances. Of course, the house included a ...

In 1983 I went to a cocktail party to celebrate the opening of the Northome installation at the Met. There were a number of related FLW items on exhibit. The Lovenesses were there, having been instrumental in saving the house, and Don was sitting on a Wright chair on display with his feet on the ott...

Wrong lake. Jones is on Delevan. Geneva is the site of the lost Lake Geneva Inn. If it is truly Delevan, that would be a tour worth crossing the country for.

The video is very imformative. What I find weird is the concrete walls with chunks of stone sticking out. It is neither desert concrete (which is suggested in the drawings) nor standard rock construction. There is something very artificial about the look of it. Justly so, since it is artificial. I h...

I'm not sure if Griffin was the lead on Dana, but since he was the most important employee in the Oak Park office at the time, he probably was. The one Dana attribute that might call to mind WBG is the use of gabled roofs instead of FLW's usual hipped. But the detailing of the Dana roof is much more...

The Stinson Library is a wonderful building, and more should be published about Griffin's work. Too bad Stinson is off the beaten path, like the fascinating Duncan House by Bruce Goff, also hiding somewhere in southern Illinois. Griffin's influence on Beachy is obvious, but I don't see much at Dana ...

I agree that codes and their enforcement vary from place to place. James De Long was able to win concessions for his houses which had 6'8" ceilings in Los Angeles! To a degree, codes exist more to justify the continued employment of bureaucrats than for building safety, their only true justific...

Wrighter, I'm not sure exactly what the painful Palmer contortion of Jester looked like (not Frank at his best) since I have seen only the floorplan, but it was an almost complete re-do of the original, like the sprawling Loeb project in CT. What I find disconcerting about Pfeiffer is that it looks ...

Boy! That exterior looks white! Wright avoided white. Is it just the photograph, or is the house painted as white as it looks? If so, I would question the authenticity. It's a wonderful house, and a great thing that it has been restored, but accuracy is paramount. And White ain't Wright.

There is a difference between quibbling over minor details (especially those made while FLW was still living) and accepting wholesale alterations that change the entire nature of the thing. It is not just the "site" of Jester that was changed, but the "environment." Jester starte...

I would say that all the fulminating over the Chahroudi/Massaro House, pro and con, does not apply to the construction of the hitherto unbuilt Haynes furniture. To complete the original design is appropriate, in fact, essential. It's the right place, original designs and materials ... unless you hav...

The Pfeiffer House is an example of why FLW projects shouldn't be constructed posthumously. Based on the Jester Project, one of FLW's most original and exciting designs, the scale, materials, construction and environment were changed to accommodate the client's needs and desires. Bruce Pfeiffer, who...

The Drummond house is a very small frame house not in the Ravine neighborhood, while the Griffin houses are all substantial structures on great sites facing the Ravine. The price of Yelland is not as surprising as the low price of whichever Griffin house was on the market. In 1984, when Stockmann wa...

Amien would get my vote as greatest Gothic cathedral. It's one of the few whose architect is known, Robert de Luzarches, and represents the style at its best: not too early with heavy Romanesque features like Durham, not too late with all the fancy fuss of Churriguera's masterpiece at Borgos in Spai...

Gehry is the most overrated architect since Michael Graves. Without "Control-Alt-Delete" he would be lost.