Page 2

 This page accompanies

the thirty-sixth edition of the FLlW UPDATE @ FrankLloydWrightInfo.com.

a supplement to the printed FLlW UPDATE, this update 9 February 2013

All items in this website © copyright 2013 W A Storrer

To return to the main page, CLICK HERE. To go to Page 3, CLICK HERE.

This is the ONLY independent, unbiased source of information on the world's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and his work.

Materials in this & related web pages are copyright © MMXII by William Allin Storrer

 SAD, but TRUE, there are those who violate copyright. There are those who have violated my copyrights to photos of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. Long ago a famous auction house used my photo of the Harper residence, S.329, to advertise the availability of that building.

More recently, a museum did a Wright show and copied plans of every building within the state. The plans were removed from the exhibit, but no penalty was ever paid, tho the director left shortly thereafter.

Now the Art Center at the Price Tower has apparently used my photo, cropped, of the Harold Price, Jr, residence, S.363, to advertise the availability of tours to that building. I was advised of this by a friendly reader of these online pages. He sent his photo of my photo, and there was no doubt of the source of what he sent. I contacted the people at Price Tower and was told I'd hear from them on this shortly. A year passed, with several emails from me in between; is this "shortly."? Should they not pay the penalty fee for copyright violation? So on the way to Austin from Michigan, I stopped there and was told "the check will be in the mail soon." It is now many years later.

Then, in 2012, I was advised of a wholesale copyright violation of my published photos of the River Forest 700 William Street buildings. My photos were digital, so dated automatically the day they were made. All of the photos on the particular web site were digitally matched with mine and only a few showed them to be originally authored; all the others exactly matched what I had published. Have the photos been removed? No. I could have sued, but to take the person to court in Michigan would cost me $7,000 which I could never recover from someone who, so I was told, was unemployed. This person, also, never showed me any credentials to prove he had any competence in the field of Wrightian architectural design or history.

Email should be sent to franklloydwright@storrer.com.

 

ALL OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT IN ONE BOOK

FIELD GUIDE & CATALOG

Color photos for all extant structures

Published November 2002 in a softcover and a limited edition hardcover. The hardcover will not be reprinted when sold out.

For a view, Click HERE

 

This is the ONLY independant, unbiased source

of informatio

n on the world's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and his work.

"Shaking Houses out of his sleeve,"

the hidden Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright

or how Wright moved from Victorian to a "Democratic American Architecture"

To view this presentation, CLICK HERE

ON THE MISUSE OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

What is art? What is art in architecture, and why is the presentation of Frank Lloyd Wright to the public failing?

Somewhere around the turn of the century (19th to 20th) Joseph Conrad wrote that art is "a single-minded effort to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe."

Wright did that in his architectural designs. His was not a company, but a single mind. Yes, occasionally he worked with other great minds, but they had to satisfy his idea. That idea was of a whole, an entire environment, from outside to inside including its furnishings.

Yet Wright-based institutions, notably the bookstores attached to Wright sites, market Wright in parts, thus shouting to the visiting public that Wright's ethos was wrong. Instead of marketing a few, well-chosen books that present Wright's work or his life in the inspirational beauty they represent, the biggest Wright bookstores market anything with the name Wright on the cover, even books filled with incorrect or incomplete information about Wright (Many Masks), his work (The Frank Lloyd Wright Encyclopedia) or books that are now outmoded (Hitchcock's In the Nature of Materials which, however much it was the standard reference in 1940, now presents but one-sixth of Wright's built work).

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This is the ONLY independant, unbiased source of information on the wrld's greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and his work.

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF A DEMOCRATIC AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE

Given that, as a child, Frank Lloyd Wright was surrounded by pictures of great architecture selected by his mother Anna, it should hardly surprise us as to why Wright chose to be an architect, to practice the Mother of all the Arts. But what kind of architecture? Wright's goal was a Democratic American Architecture, and democracy starts at home, around the hearth. Initially his designs were eclectic, Victorian, but in seeking how he could make that derivative architecture more democratic and more American, he rejected pretty Victorian decoration and looked for organic ornamentation and found interest in rectilinear forms. This led to his abstraction of the American midWestern prairie into the low, ground-hugging Prairie designs, regularized somewhat democratically on a unit system creating a grid for the plan, and freed from the box by the cantilever. This was American, not yet truly democratic. Asking what if he changed this or that, varying pinwheel and four-square plans in an endless variety, did not make Prairie any more democratic, so he rejected Prairie and went into the wilderness, tying Prairie neatly off with the Wasmuth Portfolio. While living on large commissions, Midway Gardens, the Imperial Hotel, Barnsdall Park, he worked on the American System-Built Homes project, which was realized in part in a project by Sherman Booth and in prefabricated versions for Arthur Richards, which failed due to the First World War. Then, in the Twenties, Wright conceived of his Textile Block method of construction, inexpensive yet beautiful, Democratic as he understood the concept. Four houses, each abstracted to its site, followed, and another in Oklahoma. Then Arthur McArthur bastardized Wright's Arizona Biltmore, and the Great Depression killed other projects. Wright retrenched, substituted cheap wood panels where he would have preferred masonry, and created his second generation Usonian house, single-story to suit the Prairie. Now, abstracting from the site, asking "what if" with each design, he fit home after home in a dizzying array of geometric grids, squares, rectangles, triangles, diamonds, even circular segments, to whatever site the client presented. Returning to masonry after the Second World War, he went back to Textile Block in his Usonian Automatic designs, then even followed the step he took to achieve his 1936 and later Usonians by turning the all-masonry Automatic into the Erdman Pre-fabs. Here in his Usonian designs from 1923 to 1959, fully half his architectural career, is the hidden legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright, Democratic American Architecture, each individual, each abstracted to its site.

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