Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel (shown here in pre-WWII Tokyo, Japan) was designed in 1915 and survived the 8.3-magnitude Great Kantō earthquake of 1923.
![Samuelson curates new exhibit about Wright’s life in Chicago [Chicago Tribune]
CHICAGO (May 17, 2012) – Frank Lloyd Wright’s reputation as a brilliant architect and outsized personality came from complex roots – many going back to his early years in Chicago. The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events presents Wright’s Roots, an exhibition at Expo 72, located at 72 E. Randolph Street, which highlights the beginnings of Wright’s influential architecture career.
Curated by Tim Samuelson, Chicago’s Cultural Historian, the exhibition opens Friday, June 22 and runs through Sunday, September 30, 2012 at Expo 72. Admission is free. Expo 72 is open Mondays – Thursdays 8 a.m.-7 p.m.; Fridays 8 a.m.-6 p.m.; Saturdays 9 a.m.-6 p.m.; and Sundays 10 a.m.-6 p.m. For more information, visit www.ExploreChicago.org.
Since his death in 1959, the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life and career has become legendary – and sometimes drifted into myth. Many of today’s perspectives came from Wright’s own accounts of a professional career that spanned three quarters of a century. His path to becoming a colorful public figure synonymous with modern architecture was filled with many little-known detours and diversions, but all contributed to his lasting fame and reputation.
Using seldom-seen illustrations and original artifacts to tell the story of his complex personal journey during the often-overlooked early period of his life and career, Wright’s Roots explores Wright’s formative years.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4ant5OTLQ1qbdu9qo1_500.jpg)
Samuelson curates new exhibit about Wright’s life in Chicago [Chicago Tribune]
CHICAGO (May 17, 2012) – Frank Lloyd Wright’s reputation as a brilliant architect and outsized personality came from complex roots – many going back to his early years in Chicago. The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events presents Wright’s Roots, an exhibition at Expo 72, located at 72 E. Randolph Street, which highlights the beginnings of Wright’s influential architecture career.
Curated by Tim Samuelson, Chicago’s Cultural Historian, the exhibition opens Friday, June 22 and runs through Sunday, September 30, 2012 at Expo 72. Admission is free. Expo 72 is open Mondays – Thursdays 8 a.m.-7 p.m.; Fridays 8 a.m.-6 p.m.; Saturdays 9 a.m.-6 p.m.; and Sundays 10 a.m.-6 p.m. For more information, visit www.ExploreChicago.org.
Since his death in 1959, the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life and career has become legendary – and sometimes drifted into myth. Many of today’s perspectives came from Wright’s own accounts of a professional career that spanned three quarters of a century. His path to becoming a colorful public figure synonymous with modern architecture was filled with many little-known detours and diversions, but all contributed to his lasting fame and reputation.
Using seldom-seen illustrations and original artifacts to tell the story of his complex personal journey during the often-overlooked early period of his life and career, Wright’s Roots explores Wright’s formative years.
Park Inn Hotel (1910), in Mason City, Iowa, is the last remaining Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel in the world.
Frank Lloyd Wright | Fallingwater
Fallingwater’s Justin Gunther: An Interview
Skeptics of Fallingwater’s deserved status as an icon of modernist architecture have probably never visited this picturesque house. Created for Pittsburgh’s Kaufmann family by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1936, the commission rejuvenated Wright’s career and reputation. Seventy-five years later the house and its collection are in the capable hands of Justin Gunther, Curator of Buildings and Collections at Fallingwater and faculty in historic preservation at Savannah College of Art and Design. He was formerly Manager of Restoration at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and he is formally the first to be featured in what will be a series of interviews of those charged with the stewardship of that elusive entity, the historic house museum.
From the viewpoint of style Fallingwater and Ten Chimneys could not be more opposite, yet they were both created as country retreats in the 1930s by highly sophisticated and determined people …
Do you think the building of a country house by the Kaufmanns and the Lunts could have been a response to a social inferiority complex? The Kaufmanns in trade, the Lunts on the stage?
For the Kaufmanns, the building of a country house was more a response to a love of nature. The landscape at Bear Run had long served as their retreat from the smog of the Steel City, first as a summer camp owned by their department store and later as the site of Fallingwater. The Kaufmanns were avid conservationists and believed strongly in the recuperative powers of life refreshed in nature.
However, commissioning Frank Lloyd Wright and embracing the house’s daring, radical design can be interpreted as having a basis in feelings of social inferiority. As second-generation Americans of German Jewish descent, the Kaufmanns did have a keen awareness of societal prejudices. Although their department store afforded tremendous wealth, they still held a sense of themselves as outsiders. They countered these feelings by embracing modern sensibilities, using their wealth to become one of modernism’s greatest patrons.
What is the greatest challenge in caring for Fallingwater?
In designing Fallingwater, Wright stretched conventional notions of building and living. He incorporated revolutionary ideas of spatial interaction and utilized new technologies in materials and engineering. While these innovations produced one of the world’s most dynamic buildings, they also resulted in a structure with inherent preservation challenges. From delaminating veneer on the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed furniture to spalling and cracking concrete, the issues are broad and require ongoing attention.
The preservation of Fallingwater, like Ten Chimneys, actually begins with an heir – what motivated Edgar Kaufmann Jr. to preserve Fallingwater?
Like his parents, Edgar Kaufmann Jr. strongly believed in the power of art to enrich and inspire individual lives. Underlying his art patronage and civic generosity were strong convictions about the public and educational value of art, motives which inspired Kaufmann Jr. to donate Fallingwater to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963.
You break a lot of house museum “rules” at Fallingwater – fires in the fireplace, vases of fresh flowers. How do you manager this?
In his recommendations for the Conservancy’s management of Fallingwater, Kaufmann Jr. stressed flexibility, stating the house’s “character does not depend on particular objects in fixed places, but on a sensitive, flexible response to what was the original atmosphere of Fallingwater.” The objects were “merely accoutrements of pleasant living,” “this’s and that’s” collected “out of friendship and liking for the things themselves, and brought in to simply make things more personal.” In interpreting the house, the collection should be subordinate “to the real values present.” We strive to honor this philosophy through our interpretation of the house, focusing on the message of Wright’s architecture and the house’s ability to connect people with nature in a relaxed, comfortable way.
How do you think the role of a historic house museum curator will evolve?
The overarching mission of house museums is to provide dynamic, one-of-a-kind experiences that educate and inspire our visitors. To accomplish this mission, curators of houses work to balance the preservation of buildings and objects with the public nature of our sites. As houses like Fallingwater and Ten Chimneys grow older, this balancing act will become even more challenging. How do we maintain the domestic feel of these places and prevent their sterilization while at the same time offer sufficient protection to ensure their long-term survival?
Do you have a favorite space at Fallingwater?
Fallingwater is a house filled with nuances—every inch carefully designed and crafted. Each space offers unique experiences through variations in light and space, sound and smell. Fallingwater is also a house of contradictions. It is rough stone and smooth concrete, vertical piers and horizontal parapets, projecting spaces and recessing voids, and cave-like interiors and open-air terraces, all interwoven to create a composition both awe-inspiring and intimate.
To define a favorite space is difficult for me, since the house is more about an overall experience. I think architect Paul Rudolph said it best when he described Fallingwater as “a realized dream … one that touches something deep within us about which, finally, none of us can speak.”
You have visited Ten Chimneys - What do you think Frank Lloyd Wright’s reaction to this place would have been?
I’m sure Wright would have had a nip or two. Always looking for a new client, he probably would have offered his services to build them a “better” way of life. But I think he would have appreciated the Lunts, their entertaining personalities, and their individual sense of style.
Photography by Christopher Little, courtesy of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy
![Frank Lloyd Wright’s Lewis house (1954), Tallahassee, Florida. Dwell Magazine, 2006:
In the 1940s, she [Clifton Lewis] met Wright at a world federalism conference - they were both believers in international government - and she persuaded him to design a house for her young family. Not long after, Lewis became one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in Tallahassee. Her activism led some white customers to abandon her husband’s bank, plunging the once-wealthy family into genteel poverty. The Wright house, still not finished at the time, suffered along with them.
“My mother and father had a certain amount of money and ran out of money at the point when the interior was completed,” says Ben, one of the Lewises’ four children.These days, the masonry on the outside of the house is crumbling, and the roof is propped up with two-by-fours. Then, too, the lack of storage space has led to an almost comical solution: Lewis has strung up clotheslines across the double-height living room. The mess was reported in a story in a Florida newspaper, which Ben says was “heartbreaking” because his morhter had sold a beloved beach house, her only other remaining asset, to raise the money for a roof repair.
“She’d like help with the house, but only with no strings attached,” explains Ben. Lewis hopes that when the house is finished, she can move to a new building across the street, and turn the house into a place where people, inspired by great architecture, will talk about making the world a better place. (more)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m44vbrFdcU1qbdu9qo1_500.jpg)
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Lewis house (1954), Tallahassee, Florida. Dwell Magazine, 2006:
In the 1940s, she [Clifton Lewis] met Wright at a world federalism conference - they were both believers in international government - and she persuaded him to design a house for her young family. Not long after, Lewis became one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in Tallahassee. Her activism led some white customers to abandon her husband’s bank, plunging the once-wealthy family into genteel poverty. The Wright house, still not finished at the time, suffered along with them.
“My mother and father had a certain amount of money and ran out of money at the point when the interior was completed,” says Ben, one of the Lewises’ four children.
These days, the masonry on the outside of the house is crumbling, and the roof is propped up with two-by-fours. Then, too, the lack of storage space has led to an almost comical solution: Lewis has strung up clotheslines across the double-height living room. The mess was reported in a story in a Florida newspaper, which Ben says was “heartbreaking” because his morhter had sold a beloved beach house, her only other remaining asset, to raise the money for a roof repair.
“She’d like help with the house, but only with no strings attached,” explains Ben. Lewis hopes that when the house is finished, she can move to a new building across the street, and turn the house into a place where people, inspired by great architecture, will talk about making the world a better place. (more)
Building of the week- Price Tower
Constructed in 1956, the Price Tower is one of two skyscrapers that Frank Lloyd Wright designed and the only one actually built as he believed architecture should be close to the earth, but even in his vertical structure Wright made his tower connected to nature as the “tree that escaped the forest.”
The 221’ skyscraper consist of pigmented cast concrete supporting the 19 floors on a equilateral triangle module which is carried out even in the door frames, air vents, and detailing on the ceiling.
-The structural design closely follows a tree, with the trunk as the main support in the center housing four elevator shafts leading from the shops and offices to the overhead apartments.
-The branches are the cantilevered floors and the leaves are the walls that hang from the floor above for support trimmed with the famous Frank Lloyd Wright copper detailing.
-The “tree” stands alone from the forest of the big cities against the flat Oklahoma prairie.
Melvyn Maxwell Smith House (1949) by ChicagoGeek on Flickr.
