Issue Aug 21st 2024  August 21st 2024

Price Tower For Sale...Again

The owner of Price Tower has confirmed the iconic skyscraper is officially for sale. FOX23 shared Friday that the owner, Cynthia Blanchard, was considering selling the tower.

“It’s been a process to come to that decision, but it’s the right one for the tower,” said Blanchard. Now, she is ready to sell the property and said there have been potential buyers for months.

Blanchard told FOX23 on Sunday that she was hopeful someone with a passion for the tower would take over.

“We did have a couple of private opportunities that we explored so we’ve been doing our due diligence for the last 4-5 months with different situations,” said Blanchard.

When asked how the selling of the tower could impact its shareholders, Blanchard shared there has been “very good and positive communication with them and they are very much wanting the same conclusion as everyone: a win-win.”

As for how she got to that point, she said she bought the property months before she was ready and that is why the company has not upheld their promise to put $10 million into restoring the building.

“We know that we didn’t know what we were stepping into,” said Blanchard.

She said the previous owners came to her in 2023 saying they would have to shut down and “declare bankruptcy at the end of February if nothing was done.”

In August of this year, the hotel inside the tower closed but it is still open for tours. Blanchard shared she is unsure if the tower would close if the tours stopped.

“It’s one day at a time, and I hope we will be able to continue that,” said Blanchard.

She said she is hopeful a new owner will take over in the coming months and does not plan to be involved with the tower after it is sold unless asked by the new owners.

Tulsa's Newson6 reports that the family who owns The Mayo Hotel in Tulsa confirms its interest in buying the Price Tower in Bartlesville.

"We were working on purchasing the property, but we are unable to discuss what has happened or what will happen due to a non-disclosure agreement," Macy Snyder-Amatucci said on the phone.

The Oklahoma Secretary of State's website shows the family started Price Tower Hotel and Residences LLC back in June.

Click for more details: krmg.com  

Wright At Twilight

That’s right, Wright at Twilight is back.

After the Summer Solstice event that opens the summer at the B. Harley Bradley House in Kankakee, the Wright at Twilight event serves as a bookend event to close out the summer. The event, sponsored by Wright in Kankakee, which exists to preserve Frank Lloyd Wright’s first prairie-style house at 701 S. Harrison Ave., Kankakee, is set for 5-8 p.m. Sept. 5.

Local musicians Jerry Downs and Shelby Ryan will entertain on the lawn of the property. This year’s indoor exhibit will feature the artistry of Deborah Renville, designer and creator of Hats by Adams Palmer Millinery.

Mi Casa food truck will be on site, and the Wright in Kankakee gift shop has new merchandise and will be open all evening.

Tickets cost $10 each and are available online at wright1900.org/events. Ticket holders receive two tokens that can be used for glasses of wine or bottled water. Free popcorn also will be available. Profits from the event go toward the preservation and operations of the Bradley House museum.

Bring lawn chairs and a few friends. The stars will be out at dusk, ready to dazzle.

The rain date is Sept. 12.

For more information, call the Wright in Kankakee office at 815-936-9630.

Click for more details: daily-journal.com  

William Drummond's Kindergarten-Turned-Home Hits The Market In Brookfield, IL

In the early 1900’s the near-west suburbs of Chicago were a hotbed of architectural innovation. Young Frank Lloyd Wright was designing homes in and around his Home and Studio in Oak Park and his studio nurtured the talents of many prominent architects and designers.

One of Wright’s grandest designs, the Avery Coonley House in Riverside, sparked more Prairie Style buildings in the suburbs. Built between 1908 and 1912, the estate is just one of three multi-building complexes built by Wright.

Avery Coonley’s wife Queene Ferry Coonley was a proponent of early childhood education, and she had Wright design a playhouse for her young daughter on the grounds of their estate. That playhouse later became a functioning school. After bringing early childhood education to Riverside, Coonley set her sights on other locales.

In 1911, she hired Prairie School architect, William Drummond to design another schoolhouse at 3601 Forest Avenue in Brookfield. Drummond, who grew up on Central Avenue in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, worked for Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. He later had his own architecture practice and built his family home in River Forest.

In Brookfield, the T-shaped school building Drummond designed included a large, central playroom, a small balcony on the west side of the main room and a brick fireplace on the east wall flanked by doors leading to a terrace overlooking a yard and Salt Creek.

The private kindergarten operated off and on until 1929 when Coonley donated the building to District 95.

The building served as a recreation center until the 1940s but was condemned. Residents joined forces to maintain the building. In 1949, it was sold at auction to a Mr. and Mrs. O.J. Nichol from Oak Park, who paid $6,900 for the building and turned it into a private residence.

The house recently hit the market for $675,000 and realtor Jim Ongena of @properties Christies International said that his clients put in a lot of elbow grease to maintain the historic property and bring back much of its historical essence while also making it into a family home.

Ongena’s clients bought the house out of foreclosure, and their love of architecture led them to undertake a meticulous restoration of the home. Over time, it had been converted to a four-bedroom home with a small galley kitchen and bedrooms carved out of the central room.

Armed with Drummond’s floor plans, the couple restored the grand central room, and relocated the kitchen, creating an open kitchen at the base of the balcony. Ongena said that they paid attention to every detail, replicating the original millwork and having the wood shipped in to recreate the look of the original wood trim. The design of the concrete floor with gold inlay was pulled from historic photos of the space.

Every window that they could save, they did, including the original windows on the front of the home. “What they could save, they did, and what they had to match, they did,” Ongena said.

Throughout the restoration, they relied on historically appropriate materials from soapstone counters to light fixtures to paint colors, as well as the oak, pine and walnut woods used throughout the home.

“This was their passion,” Ongena pointed out. “They didn’t gut rehab this because they wanted to save as much as possible, but they did so much to this house.”

For their efforts, the couple was rewarded with the Kristin Visser Historical Preservation Award that is given every other year to honor the renovation of a Frank Lloyd Wright or Prairie School Building.

Previous owners had added a basement garage, which the current owners use as storage. The house sits on a double lot and has access to a kayak pull-in on Salt Creek.

After all of their work, Ongena said his clients’ family has outgrown the home, but they are ready to pass it on to the next caretaker.

While the home has many of the benefits of a traditional ranch house, including an open floor plan and first-floor bedrooms and bathrooms, Ongena said that the home’s history makes it unique in the best way.

Click for more details: rblandmark.com  

Louis Sullivan: An American Architect

Coming September 3, 2024, Louis Sullivan: An American Architect by Patrick F. Cannon and Photographer James Caulfield.

Louis Henry Sullivan (1856–1924) is a foundational figure in American architecture. Long considered the father of the skyscraper, he first came to wide attention in 1889 with the completion of the Auditorium Building in Chicago. Here, for the first time, every remaining structure designed by Louis Sullivan is captured in striking color by award-winning architectural photographer James Caulfield and is accompanied by highlights of his life and accomplishments, detailed by Patrick F. Cannon.

Sullivan became famous for his dictum “form ever follows function,” and his genius shines here in stunning photographs that establish his place among the greatest of the world’s architects.

Click for more details: umn.edu  

What It’s Like To Stay At Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin

Journalists were recently invited to spend the night at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin. Lina Abascal got to explore the site — and wrestle with the architect’s complex history.

Frank Lloyd Wright lived in his 37,000-square-foot home and studio from 1911 until his 1959 death. (In 1937, however, he and his fellows started spending winters at Taliesin West in much-warmer Arizona.) But his connection to the land goes back to the mid-1800s, when his ancestors, the Lloyd Jones family, homesteaded nearby. Wright spent summers on his uncle’s farm, which led to a love of the region and the building blocks of his organic architecture principles. Taliesin is considered the most complete embodiment of those ideas, cultivated from his earlier Prairie style works. The site’s history, though, is as complicated as Wright’s, whose personal difficulties are well recorded.

"Spending the weekend at Taliesin is to live and breathe Wright’s celebrated architectural principles, and occasionally be confronted with evidence of his complex personal ones."

"The decor pulls from Wright’s own designs, as well as his collection of Asian art from his trips to China and Japan. (After all, this is the man who wanted everything in the homes he designed to reflect his taste and not "take away" from his architecture.) Look close enough, though, and you’ll count three exceptions: busts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson, and a massive painting of his mother above a fireplace in the workroom. (Perhaps a questionable spot for a structure with such a history of fires.) Throughout the residence, the ceilings are low and there’s more furniture that encourages work than comfort. But just when you feel compressed, Wright’s signature release comes with a higher ceiling and a strategically placed window, an upholstered chair or a built-in sofa with seat pads."

"In the living room, there’s a grand piano next to an angular, carved-wood sheet music stand and chair unit, designed by Wright for a string quartet. In Taliesin’s heyday, architecture apprentices and live-in multidisciplinary artists would entertain the community with live music here after hours. Those parties were likely more riotous than the dinner I attended in the drafting studio, but their details come only in the form of chatter by foundation employees. Still, I like knowing that even under Wright’s notoriously watchful eye, Taliesen residents let loose. I can see why two former apprentices, 100-year-old Minerva Montooth and Effi Casey, still live on the property half a century later (part time for Casey)."

"Over the weekend’s packed schedule of tours, hikes, and meals, I notice that folks at Taliesen can’t seem to decide whether to call its founding architect Mr. Wright or simply Wright. I imagine staff members who push for the mononym are seeking to humanize the genius through his work, and not his tumultuous personal life, which has been pored over for years in the press, and even by Gen Z on true crime TikTok. Now that I’ve been a house guest, I opt to drop the mister."

Click for more details: dwell.com