One of my favorites is the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in the Milwaukee suburbs. It looks like the mothership from Close Encounters landed in the neighborhood.
I’m pleased to see that! When I toured the building, about 12 years ago, there were buckets and water stains everywhere. Leaky roofs are the dirty little secret of the FLW legacy (well, not much of a secret).
Here’s a photo illustration of what the Chicago skyline would look like if the Illinois had been built (I don’t think this image has been posted already). It does seem completely bonkers, but I have to admire FLW’s boldness for coming up with this.
Someone must have commissioned him to draw it up, because that goes against the Wright paradigm of making a building looks like it belongs in its place.
There’s an FLW exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York now. (NY Times review is headlined “Frank Lloyd Wright Hated New York, Thought About Making the Guggenheim Pink, and Still Dreamed of Mile-High Skyscrapers.”)
Elendil’s Heir: The most famous picture “of” the Marin County Civic Center is probably this one(I remember being a kid, reading through my grandparents’ *Best of Life *book, and wondering what was going on in this tragic photo).
Thanks for both of those. Wright’s plans for Baghdad, as shown in the NYT article, were interesting and ambitious but his buildings would, I’m afraid, have been badly damaged or destroyed in the First Gulf War, if built: Baghdad Could Have Been a Mega-City by Frank Lloyd Wright - Curbed
I am going to go with Graycliff, because it’s nearly in my own backyard. This is a summer house built on a cliff overlooking Lake Erie, just south of Buffalo, NY. One of its most unique features, for a FLW house, is that nearly all the glass is clear. The wife of the family (who was the client for the house) was visually impaired. They already owned a FLW residence in the city, and all the cantilevers and the colored art glass made the house very dark, which was difficult for her, so the whole point of the summer house was to make it light. The first floor especially has huge clear glass windows, so you can see right through the house to the lake. You feel like you’re outdoors when you’re indoors.
It was in private ownership for years and years, and not maintained as an historic home. The first tour I took around 12 years ago, all you saw was this shell of a house. The non-profit that runs it has done an AMAZING job with the property – there’s been so much restoration and it’s really remarkable now. If you are a real FLW fan, Buffalo is a great destination – you can tour Graycliff, the Martin House Complex (the same family’s main residence), and a working boathouse which is a recent construction of FLW original plans. There is also a gas station, again designed by FLW and built recently, that is part of a classic automobile museum.
Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography by Meryle Secrest is, I think, the most recent well-regarded bio of him. I haven’t read it myself. PBS had a documentary about him a few years ago. Check YouTube or the gift shops of your favorite house or building of his for video tours - I’ve seen them for sale.
The thing I most love about the Western Suburbs of Chicago is how common such stories are, especially for people of a certain age. Growing up in Arlington Heights didn’t provide me the same stories as growing up in Lombard gave my wife.
Worked with a guy whose mom’s Wright needed new gutters except they would cost more than a West Suburban tract house. At least she was short enough that she didn’t bang her head on doorways. Being new to these parts I suggested she get regular gutters and paint them copper. Things at me were thrown.
Had a chance to pull one of Wright’s prefabs out of foreclosure. What I could get for my generic split-level would make the purchase a wash, then I’d have an office over the porte-cochère. Then I thought about how drafty that room would be and how bad that dump needed work that was beyond my ken and abilities and while I waffled someone else grabbed it.
Interesting bit of trivia- Ayn Rand supposedly spent time with him while she was writing The Fountainhead, and they did not get along. She disapproved of the sycophants he surrounded himself with and the cult of personality he encouraged.
