Issue 65 October 4th 2017

The Headlines

Wright Society On The Whirling Arrow

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation's blog, The Whirling Arrow, recently featured the upcoming Wright Society Virtual Summit! Follow the link to read the entire article and get ready for the Summit—it's right around the corner! Read more.

If you haven't registered for free yet, click here to do it today. There's only 15 days left!

Wright's Four Okemos Designed Homes on Tour

This Sunday, for the first time ever, the four Wright-designed homes in Okemos, Michigan will all be available to tour. Built between 1940 and 1948, the four homes, will be on a self-directed tour, where the inside of the homes may be viewed. The houses on the tour are the Erling-Brauner House , the Edward-Martin House , the Goetsch-Winckler House (on the National Register of Historic Places), and the Don Schaberg House.

The tour and a lecture are sponsored by the Historical Society of Greater Lansing and will be held from 1pm to 4pm Sunday, October 8, 2017. They are part of a statewide and national recognition of Wright’s 150th birthday. Susan Bandes, author, art history professor and director of the Museum Studies Program at Michigan State University, will give a free lecture prior to the tour on the built (and unbuilt) houses Wright designed in Okemos.

The tour is a driving tour and the houses are all within a mile or two of one another. There is no specific order of which house to tour first. Tickets for the home tour are $20 each. Read more.

How Frank Lloyd Wright Helped Shape Hollywood

The 1924 Frank Lloyd Wright Ennis House, in the dozen or so movies in which it appears, is usually given the role of the bad-guy lair—as in Blade Runner and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It has even served as the titular home in The House on Haunted Hill. It makes some sense, since the Ennis House is somewhat ominous, looking vaguely reminiscent of an ancient Mayan tomb.

Like many architects of that era, including his son Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright was looking at pre-Columbian Latin American ruins for inspiration, taking mesoamerican architecture’s most dramatic features — hieroglyphs, ziggurats, ornate bas reliefs, and more — and giving them the Hollywood treatment. Read more.

$18 Million Marin Civic Center Roof Replacement Gets Approval

The Marin County Board of Supervisors Tuesday approved an almost $18 million contract to replace the iconic roof of the 55-year-old Marin County Civic Center. The 470,168-square foot Civic Center building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is the famed architect's largest completed public project and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Starting in the Spring of 2018, the Novato-based Arntz Builders Inc. will undertake the replacement of the 220,000-square-foot concrete roof with blue coating and stylized ornamentation. The roof currently has four layers of recoating and patchwork, and despite repairs in 1999 and 2000 the membrane is fracturing and peeling, there are leaks and the iconic blue color is fading, according to the Marin County Department of Public Works. The replacement project entails removing old material and applying a new polyurethane membrane that is durable, resistant to high winds and fire, easy to maintain and has a comprehensive 20-year warranty. Read more.

Blue Sky Mausoleum Mostly Empty

Among the towering monuments and notable tombs that fill Buffalo’s historic Forest Lawn Cemetery lies a crypt that stands out from the rest. The memorial burial chamber was executed well after Wright's passing, but the original design was intended to be the final resting place of businessman Darwin Martin, a close friend and lifelong patron of Frank Lloyd Wright. As cool as it is to have it finally executed, this multi-crypt sits nearly empty today. Read more.

Taliesin West's Music Pavilion Roof Restored With Sunbrella Fabric

Frank Lloyd Wright's love of performing arts prompted him to build two performance spaces at his winter home in Scottsdale, Arizona. After Wright’s passing, a fire in the mid-1960s burned Taliesin West's Music Pavilion to the ground. The Music Pavilion was reconstructed with steel beams and the canvas enclosure was replaced with translucent fiberglass, maintaining the filtered daylight in the space.

In the 1990s, the roofing system was again transitioned from fiberglass to an acrylic exterior sheet and a canvas interior panel, to replicate the feel of the original canvas structure. In the more recent years, to meet code requirements, a flame retardant was applied to the canvas interior panels. Over time the retardant discolored, causing the panels to become unsightly.

Now thanks to a generous donation from Sunbrella, the discolored interior canvas ceiling of Taliesin West’s Music Pavilion has been replaced by a high-quality Sunbrella fabric. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation has documented the transformation and the process of taking this significant space back to Wright’s intended aesthetic. Read more.

Life In A Walter Burley Griffin House

Rich Berry and his wife, Mary Mioux Berry moved into the house in Edwardsville, Illinois when they got married in 1988. The home’s architect, Walter Burley Griffin, designed the Prairie-style home in 1906 for his older brother, Ralph. The house was built in 1909-10. Griffin had worked for architect Frank Lloyd Wright from 1901 to 1906 in his Oak Park studio before establishing his own practice. In 1914, he moved to Australia and won an international competition to design the capital city of Canberra. He and his wife, Marion Mahony Griffin, who had also worked for Wright, designed other buildings there.The Berrys spent years restoring the home and redoing past renovations to get it back to its 1910-era condition, with a few modern updates. Read more.

Frank Lloyd Wright For The Future

Serving as an apprentice, resident, and practitioner from 1957-1978 at Taliesin West, Vern Swaback has experienced firsthand Wright’s groundbreaking and innovative ideas. On Thursday, October 26, 2017, Swaback will return to Taliesin West, Wright’s winter home and desert laboratory, to discuss the experiences that led him to believe Wright will be more relevant and famous in the future than he was even in his own time. Read more.

Photographer Tim Street-Porter Has Made LA His Muse

The internationally celebrated photographer Tim Street-Porter has had an unwavering devotion to the architecture and design of Los Angeles. Since he left his native Britain in the late 1970s, he has authored six books as both writer and photographer spanning nearly forty years. They read like a visual love letter to the glamour, originality and modernity of his adopted city. Three of those books —The Los Angeles House, Los Angeles Deluxe, L.A. Modern— are considered definitive reference guides to the history of design and architecture in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Deluxe included such iconic landmarks as the houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, and John Lautner. Read more.

Andrew Pielage On Mission To Photograph Every Wright

Phoenix-based photographer Andrew Pielage is on a mission to shoot every one of the 532 Frank Lloyd Wright structures still standing in the world. The 39-year-old is the unofficial photographer of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. His interest began when he first toured Taliesin West in 2011. Photography wasn’t allowed on that tour, but later a friend connected Pielage with the folks at Taliesin West. Pielage shot the sprawling stone-and-wood compound for them. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation loved his work and he became its unofficial photographer. So far, he has shot about 50 Wright structures, so we look forward to seeing more exciting photos from Andrew in the future. Read more.

Support Wright Society

Now Available: October 2017 Explore Wright Issue

Our latest bi-monthly issue of Explore Wright is being sent out this week to those of you who've opted into a subscription (or receive copies via the Silver/Gold/Platinum Levels of our supporter program)!

This current issue will "explore" the influence that the Japanese pavilion at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (known as the "Ho-o-den") had on Frank Lloyd Wright's developing sense of architecture.

REMINDER: There's some excellent historic images of the Ho-o-den that were recently posted at WrightSocietyChat.com, which you can view here.

If you'd like, we're offering a complimentary digital copy of Explore Wright's inaugural issue in PDF format that can be viewed on any device. Download here. This June 2017 issue looks at Wright's Sturges House in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles.

We're also providing three types of subscriptions for the bi-monthly Explore Wright newsletter...should you find our complimentary version enjoyable and be interested in future ones.

[$15] Digital Only Subscription: You’ll receive 6 bi-monthly newsletter issues per year. They'll be delivered via email in a digital PDF format, which you may view on any device.

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Remember, your purchase goes directly towards supporting the content curation and creation efforts it takes to produce the weekly Wright Society email and the Wright Society Virtual Summit. And we sincerely and truly appreciate your contribution!

Email bryan[at]wrightsociety.com if you have any questions.

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