Issue 243 March 3rd 2021

The Headlines

LISTEN NOW: The Historic Park Inn's Original Grand Opening In 1910

The latest episode from podcast "2021: 10 Successful Years of the Historic Park Inn" is here.

2021 marks the 10th anniversary of the restoration of Mason City's Historic Park Inn Hotel. Once a month, in partnership with Mason City's Wright on the Park, they will be looking back on the building's history, as well as the stories of the people who have been involved along the way.

Scott Borcherding, former president of Wright on the Park and a partner and interior designer with local architecture firm Bergland and Cram, joins the show to guide us through the Historic Park Inn’s original grand opening in 1910.

In this episode, they revisit the building’s original features and Wright’s intentions behind them — some of which are particularly unique elements for a Wright project — as well as the process of researching and pinning down these details during the restoration project.

Podcast episodes will be released monthly. You can listen online on the website, globegazette.com, or most places you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts and more. Search the title: "2021: 10 Successful Years of Wright on the Park: Wright Comes to Mason City."

A Stay At Taliesin West Alters Perceptions Of The Site

For two years now, Quentin Béran has worked on a PhD about the home and studios of Frank Lloyd Wright. In January 2021, he was able to visit the complex of Taliesin West for the first time. In this issue of The Whirling Arrow, he shares how his initial perception of the home and studio’s architecture vastly changed after arriving and experiencing the site for himself.

"First, I visited Taliesin West during a very unusual situation. I arrived on site January 8th, and due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the tours had just recently resumed and only for four days a week. Indeed, I was able to be almost alone in the complex to study it and photograph it, but most of all, to wander in it and experience it. Working on architectural drawings (plans, sections and elevations) and photographs of Taliesin West, I had a pretty clear idea about its composition. However, architecture is a tridimensional art and it’s impossible to perfectly understand a building before visiting it. A photograph, because of its bidimensionality, would never be able to portray a space. A video doesn’t work either because even if it follows the path of a person in movement into the space, it always focuses on one point preventing the viewer from looking around, to take in every detail of the architecture. To truly understand a space, you have to live it." Read about Quentin Béran's expirience here.

Willey House Stories — The Space Within: Part 1, "Little Boxes"

In the first of a special five-part feature series for the Whirling Arrow's ongoing Willey House Stories, homeowner Steve Sikora explores variations on the theme from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s Spring 2021 Quarterly issue “The Space Within.”

In Part 1, titled “Little Boxes,” Steve explores three concepts: (1) Breaking the box, (2) The box as confinement, and (3) The box as conformity. Read it here.

Interview With Stuart Graff, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation CEO

In 1940, Frank Lloyd Wright established a foundation to — in his own words — "make life more beautiful, the world a better one for living in, and to give reason, rhyme, and meaning to life." For the past eight decades, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation has continued with the mission of inspiring people to discover and embrace an architecture for better living through meaningful connections to nature, the arts, and each other. As with many organizations, 2020 was a difficult year for the foundation with its tours, performances, and lectures cancelled and much of its programming moved online.

To learn more about the foundation, and its plans for 2021 and beyond, designboom spoke with its president and CEO Stuart Graff. In the interview, which can be read in full here, Graff discusses what he and his team learned from a challenging 12 months and the significance of having eight Frank Lloyd Wright sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Works — The Imperial Hotel

On Monday March 1st, The Frank Lloyd Wright Trust premiered the most recent addition to their online video series "Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Works" with a virtual recreation of Wright's incomparable Imperial Hotel.

Two years in the making by Razin Khan and based on a Japanese publication of original plans and historical photos, this comprehensive digitally-animated recreation of Wright's masterpiece is an amazing achievement. You can get a sense of this tragically lost building by watching the animation here.

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