Music and Cats

An architect’s most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site. — Frank Lloyd Wright

Most architects I know love to travel. While we enjoy experiencing different scenery, cultures and food, we often go places to look at architecture. Cameras and sketchbooks in hand, we make pilgrimages to visit buildings that we have studied in architecture history class, or seen on the glossy pages of professional journals.

Because of our desire to get up close and personal with the buildings we admire, archi-tourism is big business in places with a critical mass of important structures. Until recently, I would not have thought that Buffalo, NY, might be anyone’s idea of an archi-tourist destination. However, Buffalo is making an unusual attempt to become a more important pilgrimage site for devotees of America’s favorite architect son, Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Buffalo area is home to several Wright buildings, including the Prairie-style Darwin Martin House and its associated structures, all now undergoing restoration, and Graycliff, Martin’s summer cottage overlooking Lake Erie. Martin was an executive with the Larkin Soap Manufacturing Company, for which Wright designed the Larkin Building, his first major public work. Sadly, the elegant, innovative Larkin Building was demolished in 1950; only one of its massive brick fence piers remains, marking the parking lot that now occupies the site.

Soon Buffalo will have added to its collection of Wright houses three brand new projects based on the architect’s design sketches from the early part of the 20th century. The lead architect on all three projects, Anthony Puttnam, apprenticed with Wright in the 1950s; he maintains that Wright left his sketches to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation with the intent that they be built. Since Wright’s death in 1959, about 15 of his unrealized sketches have been developed and built. The Foundation, which owns the rights to Wright’s sketches, is paid a licensing fee for each realized design.

Buffalo already has one posthumously-constructed Frank Lloyd Wright design, the Blue-Sky Mausoleum, located in Forest Lawn Cemetery. This was the last of the four Wright designs commissioned by Darwin Martin, who died before the mausoleum could be built. While Martin intended the mausoleum for his family, Forest Lawn is now selling the 24 crypts to anyone willing to pay their price. Here’s their sales pitch: Once in a lifetime… Once in an Eternity… An Opportunity to join one’s own legacy to that of America’s greatest architect. Pretty creepy, isn’t it?

The mausoleum was originally designed for Forest Lawn, but was constructed on a different sloping site within the cemetery than that selected by Wright. While Wright conceived a structure clad in white marble, white granite was substituted because of its greater weather resistance.

This boathouse design, which wil be built by Buffalo’s West Side Rowing Club, was originally conceived as a boathouse for the rowing team at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI. Wright first designed the boathouse in 1905, then redesigned it in a more modern style in 1930. A specific site in Madison was never selected for the boathouse.

This filling station design, drawn in 1927, will be built as part of the new Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum. The museum site is five blocks from where the filling station was originally envisioned by Wright. Wright did not completely design the interior, so Buffalo architect Patrick J. Mahoney and Puttnam are having to make some assumptions about his intent; Puttnam says it’s more accurate to describe the building as “based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s concept” than as a Wright design.

Frank Lloyd Wright was known for making changes to his designs even while his buildings were under construction. These projects are being built without benefit of his careful control of the entire design and construction process. His self-described favorite tools, the eraser and wrecking bar, will be missing from these sites. Will these buildings, when completed, be Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, or something else entirely? Some well-known critics have strong feelings about this question, as indicated in a recent Buffalo News article.

From Micheal Kimmelman, chief art critic of the New York Times:

“It seems to me extremely dubious to be constructing buildings based on drawings by Wright as if these are actually Wright’s works. […] Wright was notoriously ingenious about changing his designs in the process, and these drawings cannot be said to represent anything but one stage in the concept of a design by Wright,” Kimmelman said. “So while it’s an interesting exercise, it also comes perilously close to kitsch, and even to misrepresenting Wright’s genius.”

Neil Levine, Gleason Professor of the history of art and architecture at Harvard University, and the author of three books on Wright, takes a dim view:

“I think if they build those things, it could do more damage than good. It’s just ridiculous,” Levine said. “It trivializes the architecture and will ultimately detract from the good things being done.”

Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker’s architecture critic and dean of Parsons The New School for Design, isn’t pleased, either:

What’s happening, he said, can be compared to the long line of questionable albums released under rock great Jimi Hendrix’s name in the years since his death in 1970. “This is like imagining Jimi Hendrix had written some music, never recorded it and then you got a computer synthesis of his voice and pretended it was him,” Goldberger said.

I, too, would rather that these projects not be built. To my mind, they will be, at best, Wrightian. I fear that their modern-day architects will attempt to be so faithful to Wright’s sketches that changes appropriate to sites and contexts - changes that Wright himself might make, were he alive - will never be considered.

Will these three projects really contribute to Buffalo’s attractiveness as an archi-tourist destination? They will not influence any decision that I might someday make to visit Buffalo. I might go to Buffalo for the Darwin Martin House, and, were it still standing, I would definitely make an architectural pilgrimage to see the Larkin Building. If I were to find myself in Buffalo with some extra time on my hands, I might go see these new buildings. Or maybe not. I just don’t know.

Tags: 8 Comments