Issue Jun 26th 2024 June 26th 2024

The Headlines

Dismantling of Wayfarers Chapel Wrapping Up

The weeks-long dismantling of the famed Wayfarers Chapel, a popular spot for weddings and receptions designed by Lloyd Wright that was damaged due to land movement during a barrage of winter storms, neared completion this week with the removal of the structure’s final support beams.

Owners of the Rancho Palos Verdes, California chapel announced in May that they had decided to take down the facility in response to the devastating ground movement that left the property unsafe. The 100-seat, glass chapel opened in 1951 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2023.

Burchett told the Daily Breeze that the structural beams and other materials are being placed in storage, pending a decision on rebuilding.

Parts of the Palos Verdes Peninsula have been experiencing land movement of up to 12 inches per week, worsening with winter rains.

With the land movement threatening the structure, the owners opted to dismantle the facility — at an estimated cost of $20 million — in hopes of rebuilding in another location, which has not yet been announced.

“Wayfarers is committed to preserving our iconic chapel exactly as it has always been, either on the current site or a similar site close by in Rancho Palos Verdes,” Wayfarers Executive Director Dan Burchett said at the time. “We are taking immediate action to carefully disassemble the chapel’s historic materials as a necessary step in the preservation of the chapel for generations to come.”

A GoFundMe page working to raise money to save the chapel has raised more than $75,000 as of Monday.

National Building Museum Exhibits Explore D.C. Brutalism And Wright In Pennsylvania

Two new exhibitions at the National Building Museum (NBM) in Washington, D.C., examine particular strains of Modernism in different places—and then wonder what could be or what might have been. Capital Brutalism looks at the architectural style that found fertile soil in D.C, in the 1960s and 1970s and later became the type of design the public loved to hate. Focusing on seven polarizing examples of Brutalism, it presents brief histories of these projects and then offers an alternative future for six of them. The other exhibition, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania, shows a range of works designed by the architect from the 1930s through the 1950s in Pittsburgh and the area around Fallingwater, the landmark house he created for department store magnate Edgar J. Kaufmann. For five of those projects—ones that weren’t built—Skyline Ink Animators + Illustrators has produced animated films that depict what they would have been had they been realized.

Federal buildings are often targets of criticism, but federal buildings designed in the Brutalist style seem to generate a particularly intense strain of invective. The J. Edgar Hoover Building (1975), which serves as headquarters of the FBI, for example, has been voted one of the ugliest buildings in the world. Located roughly a mile away, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s home base at the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building (1968), was called in 2009 “among the most reviled in all of Washington—and with good reason,” by none other than the secretary of HUD at the time, Shaun Donovan. A previous HUD secretary, Jack Kemp, described the building as “10 floors of basement.” Some examples of D.C. Brutalism have been torn down, including the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, designed by Araldo Cossutta of I.M. Pei & Partners in 1970, and razed in 2014. Others have bull’s eyes on their broad concrete facades and may yet confront dates with the wrecking ball.

As we wrestle with issues of sustainability, though, we’re beginning to realize that tearing down buildings is a wasteful way of updating our cities. And so, strategies to adaptively reuse existing structures are garnering growing support among the public, building professionals, and academics. Capital Brutalism, co-organized by the NBM and the Southern Utah Museum of Art, and co-curated by Angela Person of the University of Oklahoma and architectural photographer Ty Cole, presents plans for re-inventing six of the seven projects in the exhibition. The seventh one—the Euram Building by Hartman-Cox Architects—is an outlier here in many ways, being a privately owned corporate headquarters rather than a government or university building and trying to fit into its Dupont Circle context rather than stand out from it.

While the exhibition doesn’t explore in any depth the ideas behind the original Brutalist architecture, it includes contemporary reviews of the buildings by critics such as Ada Louise Huxtable, Hilton Kramer, and Benjamin Forgey, and some articles from publications like Architectural Record. Recent photographs by Ty Cole show what the buildings look like today.

The Wright show—co-organized by the Westmoreland Museum of American Art and Fallingwater, which is administered by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy—focuses on a geographic area that was critical to reviving the master’s career in the 1930s and beyond. Thanks to the patronage of the Kaufmann family, Wright returned to the pinnacle of American architecture after a series of personal and professional disasters earlier in the century. The exhibition presents photographs, models, and drawings of three built projects—Fallingwater, a private office for Kaufmann, Sr., and Kentuck Knob (a Usonian house for the Hagan family)—and a number of unrealized projects. Five of the never-built ones are depicted by Skyline Ink in virtual explorations, short animations that zoom around and through the designs. The most impressive of these are the three in Pittsburgh: the Point Park Civic Center at the confluence of the city’s three rivers, the Point View Residences overlooking Point Park, and a self-service parking garage for Kaufmann department store. The animations aren’t cutting-edge and include annoying pauses mid-stream, but they help bring to life ambitious schemes that reveal Wright’s bold vision for a future driven by the automobile, post-war affluence, and innovative building technologies.

Capital Brutalism is on view through February 17, 2025, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania is on view through March 17, 2025.

State Museum Of Pennsylvania Opens “Fallingwater” Exhibit

The State Museum of Pennsylvania has opened a new exhibit celebrating Fallingwater, the world-famous home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Fayette County. “Seeing Fallingwater – Celebrating Pennsylvania’s Architectural Masterpiece” marks the 50th anniversary of Fallingwater’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The centerpiece of the exhibit is an architectural model of the building commissioned in the 1980s for the Museum of Modern Art. Also available are a computer animation of Fallingwater and graphic panels to interpret the history of Fallingwater. The exhibit will be open through January 5, 2025, in Brockerhoff Hall, Floor No. 1 in the museum located adjacent to the State Capitol in Harrisburg.

La Verne Lantz Family Home For Sale

Thanks to George Hall for alerting us that La Verne Lantz’s first family home, built 1965 when LaVerne and Mollie moved from downtown Milwaukee to Delafield, WI, is currently on the market for $575,000. The Lantzs befriended several Wright apprentices (including John Ottenheimer) during construction of the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, opened in 1961, and were inspired by Wright’s architecture. Through this association they became very familiar with Taliesin and the Fellowship. LaVerne, who taught drafting and other subjects at a Milwaukee high school, included many Wrightian principles in this, his first family home on Moraine End Drive. Just a few years later, with wife Mollie as a full participant, he designed and constructed a second home next door, followed by a third next door, very reminiscent of Bruce Goff. While teaching, LaVerne nevertheless found time to design over 100 homes in nearby area communities, and farther afield in Mazomanie and Arena, and above La Crosse on the Mississippi River. A member of a local Delafield flying club, he also designed his own airplane. Denver architect Michael Knoor, and La Verne’s draftsman while in high school and college, produced a monograph on LaVerne in 2014, and available here.

Sarah FitzSimons In Conversation About Wright's Architecture

Framing Culture’s host José C. Teixeira traveled to Two Rivers, WI, with Sarah FitzSimons, to visit one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s beautiful houses. “Still Bend” (or The Bernard and Fern Schwartz House), 1939, serves as inspiration to a lively conversation on architecture, in an episode solely devoted to observations and reflections on this topic. FitzSimons is an artist, researcher, and professor at the UW-Madison Art Department, and she is deeply engaged with sculpture and space. She creates sculptural objects which interact with and derive meaning from their surroundings. Though diverse in form and material, much of her creative work explores a merging of interior and exterior spaces – both in physical and psychological terms – and seeks to connect our constructed culture and daily lives with wider patterns and systems in nature. FitzSimons has developed site-specific projects for the Chicago Architecture Biennial; Vadehavsfestival (Denmark); Casa da Inquisição Monsaraz (Portugal); and Djerassi Foundation (Woodside, CA). Recent exhibitions have included her work at the Alps Art Academy (Switzerland); Casa das Artes, Tavira (Portugal); Grand Rapids Art Museum (MI), the Nona Jean Hulsey Gallery (Oklahoma City, OK), among others.

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