Two Talks on Frank Lloyd Wright's San Francisco Office and its Remarkable Travels

[wjsaia]

Two Lectures in Pennsylvania, Wednesday March 15th and Thursday, March 16th

The announcements for these two talks each contain descriptions that are not quite accurate.

Paul Turner, Wattis Professor of Art, Emeritus, Stanford University, advises that his talk in Erie on Wednesday, March 15th at 7:00 PM will be a comprehensive overview of the San Francisco office––the reason Wright decided to create it, its design and construction, how it was used by Wright and Green, its dismantlement, and then its odyssey across the country and eventual reconstruction in Erie. So the website’s description, indicating that the talk is just about the office’s travels, is incorrect.

As for Paul's talk in Pittsburgh on Thursday (not Wednesday as advertised), March 16th at 5:30 PM, the website gives a title that indicates it’s just about the office when it was in Pittsburgh––whereas Paul will be giving basically the same talk as the one in Erie the night before.

Wright's San Francisco Field Office

I worked in this place in San Francisco over the course of about twenty years until it was first dismantled in 1988, so my wife Trisha and I are going to Erie to visit it in its most recent incarnation there as a permanent exhibit at the Hagen History Center and attend Paul Turner's talk on March 15th, which will be presented at the Jefferson Educational Society, some distance away from the Hagen History Center. We'd be pleased to meet any Wright Chat denizens who might also be able to make it to Erie on that night.

WJS

Paul V. Turner, Ph.D., was trained as both an architect and an art historian. He taught the history of architecture at Stanford from 1971 to 2006, offering a broad range of courses to undergraduates and graduate students, from a survey of world architecture to courses on Baroque, 19th- and 20th-century European and American architecture and urbanism, and seminars on various subjects. His publications include works on the architects Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Joseph Ramée, and the history of the American campus. (His book Campus, An American Planning Tradition, won the Society of Architectural Historians' Hitchcock Prize, for the best book on architecture in the year 1984.) Following the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, which seriously damaged Frank Lloyd Wright's Hanna House, on the Stanford campus, Turner chaired a university committee which oversaw the complicated process of restoring the house, completed in 1999. This experience increased his long-held interest in Wright, and he wrote a book on the architect's work in the Bay Area, Frank Lloyd Wright and San Francisco, published in 2016. He then began a project on the importance of books to Wright, involving a reconstruction of the architect's extensive library, which had largely been dispersed. This led to the creation of a website on the subject, "Frank Lloyd Wright's Library," produced on a Stanford University Libraries site (flwlibrary.sites.stanford.edu). In 2021 he wrote a memoir of his childhood summers on an elderly woman's estate on Lake George, which had a formative influence on his love of art and history. In 2020 Turner was named a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians.

[pmahoney]

See you there Bill!