Issue 59 August 23rd 2017

Special Offer

End of Summer Savings: 45% Off All Teco Pottery

Teco Pottery vases are 45% off during this special End of Summer Sale!

This is something PrairieMod only does every once in awhile for Wright Society email subscribers like you. The general public does not receive offers such as this one right here.

Sale ends 11:59pm Eastern on Tuesday August 29th, 2017.

Use discount code SUMMER17 at checkout to secure your 45% savings. Click to order.

SPECIAL NOTE: This discount works in combination with items already marked down like the popular White 2 Buttress and White 4 Buttress vases.

And don't wait—stock is limited with many shapes and glazes already sold out.

The Headlines

SC Johnson Collaborates with the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial

From September 16, 2017, to January 7, 2018, SC Johnson will offer free tours and motor coach transportation to the public from the Chicago Cultural Center – the hub of the Chicago Architecture Biennial – to the Racine campus and back. All tours include the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Research Tower and Administration Building. Weekend trips also include Wingspread. Additionally, SC Johnson will open its campus for "Wright at Night" evening tours with Community Programs at SC Johnson's Golden Rondelle Theater. Free and open to the public, tours will be offered Thursday through Sunday and reservations are required. Read more.

Frank Lloyd Wright NYC Legacy Lives On

Frank Lloyd Wright had a frosty relationship with New York City. In a 1957 TV interview he told Mike Wallace "It's all a race for rent, and it is a great monument I think to the power of money and greed. I don't see an idea in the whole thing anywhere, do you? Where is the idea in it? What's the idea?" But even with the dearth of his buildings there, Wright's legacy lives on in a handful of New York City locations. After you've seen "Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive," at MOMA, consider visiting the Frank Lloyd Wright room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Read more.

How to Sell a Frank Lloyd Wright House

The New York Times tells the stories of five very different Frank Lloyd Wright houses that have recently changed hands or are now on the market. Noting that "marketing these houses offers unique challenges, including the need to become a Wright expert, to devise a strategy for separating potential buyers from sightseers, and to develop a convincing argument for why someone should pay a premium to live in a house with small bedrooms, a snug kitchen, cinder-block walls, cement floors, narrow doorways, a carport instead of a garage and, quite likely, no air-conditioning. For potential buyers, it means becoming the steward of a legacy, which includes instant membership in an exclusive, sometimes intrusive, society of Wright enthusiasts." Read more.

Take a Peek Inside This Milwaukee-Area Wright Remodel

When Craig Adelman inherited a Frank Lloyd Wright designed home from his late parents, Albert and Edith, he knew that he wanted to make it his own while remaining true to Wright’s original vision. So he hired Kubala Washatko Architects – a Cedarburg, Wisconsin firm that had previously designed an addition to Wright’s First Unitarian Society Meeting House in Madison – to restore its interior and expand its exterior, adding a pool, a 700-square-foot pool house, and enlarging the patio. Read more.

Graphically Mapping The Evolution of Wright's Oak Park Designs

Phil Thompson of Cape Horn Illustration has created a new graphic map of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park designs. Wright's hometown for many years, Oak Park, Illinois is also the site of the greatest concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed homes and buildings than anywhere else in the world. Having designed structures for the neighborhood for nearly four decades, Wright used Oak Park as a place to try out new techniques and evolve his personal style. The map is organized both chronologically and by location, and allows viewers to make connections between the structures, as their lines evolved from gabled to flat roofs and expanded in scale and in ambition. Read more.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Futurist Dream For Ellis Island

Always ahead of his time, one of the last projects envisioned by Frank Lloyd Wright was a plan to turn Ellis Island in NYC into a community that was part Jetsons-worthy luxury/part proto-live-work colony. What Wright proposed was a city of the future, but unfortunately he died 6 days before an important meeting to pitch his ideas. He left behind conceptual sketches — one on a napkin from the Plaza hotel — which were turned into formal plans by Elwood M. Doudt and Jerry Damon. Read more.

50 Years of Living Wright In Glencoe

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Sherman Booth House in Glencoe, Illinois celebrated its centennial in 2016, and Sonia Bloch has lived in the house for half of that time. She and her husband, Ted, bought the home in 1967, seeing past its state of disrepair to its inherent beauty. They restored and maintained it for half a century, keeping Wright’s original details in good shape and enjoying the landscape he sited it on. 150 years after Wright’s birth, the home has an interesting history and maintains an influence on the town to this day. The house recently hit the market and is ready for its next steward. Read more.

PlansMatter Home Rentals Designed by Famous Architects

PlansMatter, the architectural rental site, works along the same lines as Airbnb, but focuses on modern spaces. Stating that “The goal of PlansMatter is to make finding and experiencing architecturally-significant vacation rentals simple and convenient.” Some of the homes listed on PlansMatter have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, and other iconic archtiects. Read more.

Price Tower Receives Keeping It Modern Grant

Only the second Frank Lloyd Wright site to ever be selected (the Robie House was selected in 2014), Bartlesville’s Price Tower is one of 12 recipients in the U.S. of the Getty Foundation’s 2017 Keeping It Modern Grants. The foundation recently announced $1.66 million in architectural conservation grants dedicated to 12 significant 20th century buildings as part of its Keeping it Modern initiative. Read more.

Wright's Barton House Getting Major Rehab

The historic Martin House project in North Buffalo, New York is getting into the last phases of restoration of the Frank Lloyd Wright design. The new phase is rehabilitation of the Barton House, originally built for family members of Darwin D. Martin. Designed much more simply than the main part of the complex, the Barton House looks a lot like the Martin House. There has been very little done to the building since it was purchased. Director Mary Roberts says the building has the same wiring, plumbing, and much of the heating installed when the estate construction started 110 years ago. Read more.

Edgar Ramírez Takes You Inside Wright’s Legendary Ennis House

GQ Style takes us inside some of America’s most breathtaking locations in their new video series, “Amazing Spaces.” Hosted by actor Edgar Ramírez, they are starting with Frank Lloyd Wright’s mysterious LA mansion, the Ennis House. The Ennis House is one of the most unusual and grandest homes in Wright’s body of work. View here.

About

This weekly Wright Society update is brought to you by Eric O'Malley with Bryan and Lisa Kelly from PrairieMod. If you enjoy these free, curated updates—please forward our sign-up page and/or share on Social Media.

If you’d like to submit content to be featured here, please reach out by emailing us at mail[at]wrightsociety.com.