Shaking Words Out of His Sleeve

© Mark Hertzberg (2023) except photo from Paul Hendrickson of him in his home office

Frank Lloyd Wright told his client for Midway Gardens that “The thing (design) has simply shaken itself out of my sleeve.” Paul Hendrickson, author of the 2019 book about Wright, Plagued by Fire – The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright, is not much different than Wright in that respect.

We became friends when he was writing Plagued. I have subsequently read many of his books because I am captivated by his writing style. After getting to preview his forthcoming (2024) Fighting the Night about his father in World War II, I wrote him that I think that just as Wright claimed to shake designs out of his sleeve, I think he has a gift to shake words out of his sleeve, letting them flow magically through his fingers and across his keyboard. He is often described as a former reporter for The Washington Post, but Paul was a writer, not just a literal reporter of facts. He now teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hendrickson does not pontificate or lecture the reader. His books are more of a conversation with his readers. He often walks readers through the building blocks that make up the story with explanations in the narrative, eliminating the need to constantly refer to the end notes.

Hendrickson’s first exposure to Wright was when he rode his bicycle past the B. Harley Bradley House near his home in Kankakee, Illinois:

https://wrightinracine.wordpress.com/2019/04/10/an-advance-peek-at-plagued-by-fire/

He came home to Kankakee last week as a guest of Wright in Kankakee to talk about the book. The reception for him at the Bradley House and his lecture at the Kankakee Public Library were originally scheduled for March 2020. Then came the Pandemic. This was the first time I heard Hendrickson lecture, no, not lecture, rather, have a conversation with his readers.

Hendrickson, left, with Gaines and Sharon Hall who bought and restored the Bradley House, and then made it possible for Wright in Kankakee to acquire it.

Hendrickson dedicated Plagued to Tim Samuelson, City of Chicago Cultural Historian Emeritus.

I close asking one favor from you…when you order Hendrickson’s or anyone’s books, first try a local bookshop rather than reflexively ordering from the Big A. We need to save our local bookshops.

Wright in Kankakee’s website:

https://wright1900.org

Please scroll down to see previous posts or articles, including the last one about Tim Samuelson’s “Wright Before the Lloyd”exhibit which just opened in Racine, Wisconsin. It is a reinterpretation of the exhibit he had in Elmhurst, with an emphasis on Wright and Cecil Corwin. 

“Wright Before the Lloyd”

© Mark Hertzberg, Tim Samuelson, and Racine Heritage Museum (2023). Images of individual artifacts cannot be reproduced without permission.

A few weeks ago I teased you with this photo of a U-Haul truck, and told you that a bunch of “stuff” was being delivered to the Racine, Wisconsin, Heritage Museum for a major exhibit about Frank Lloyd Wright and Cecil Corwin. Museum executive director Christopher Paulson and curator Allison Barr worked tirelessly with Tim Samuelson for over a year to bring it to life.

Now it is time to pull the curtain back on the exhibit which opened May 4, and runs through 2024.

Racine designer Robert Hartmann originally designed the exhibit space with  a sense of “compression and release” in 2011.

“Wright before the ‘Lloyd,’” highlights the young Frank L. Wright and his friend Cecil Sherman Corwin, the forgotten architect and mentor who did much to shape him into the architect we know as Frank Lloyd Wright.   

Wright wasn’t always Frank Lloyd Wright. In his youthful years of architectural practice at the end of the 19^th Century, he was very different from the brash, self-confident public celebrity who several decades later gave Racine its landmark S.C. Johnson & Son campus. Born Frank Lincoln Wright, the young architect signed his works prosaically as “Frank L. Wright.”

He had arrived in Chicago in 1886 as an inexperienced and self-doubting nineteen-year-old aspiring architect. He was warmly welcomed into employment with the office of architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee by Corwin, the firm’s chief draftsman. Both Corwin and Wright were sons of  much-traveled ministers. Corwin’s father, the Rev. Eli Corwin, was the popular pastor of Racine’s First Presbyterian Church from 1880 – 1888.

Corwin and Wright quickly discovered they had much in common, including similar passions for architecture, culture and music. They became inseparable friends. They shared ideas in their practice of architecture for 10 years. For many years, they shared a small office in downtown Chicago. Each had projects and clients of their own, but critiques and comments were freely shared. In later years, Wright often recalled his appreciation for the guidance, confidences and camaraderie Corwin provided in guiding his personal life, and shaping the professional identity that later gave him fame. In An Autobiography (1932) Wright wrote that he had found “a kindred spirit” when he met Corwin.

The exhibit is curated by Tim Samuelson, the City of Chicago’s Cultural Historian Emeritus.

Tim Samuelson, left, David Jameson, and Eric O’Malley of O A + D at a planning meeting for the Racine Heritage Museum’s exhibition about the Racine-related work of Alfonso Iannelli in 2018,

It is comprised of his extensive collection of early Wright architectural salvage, drawings and images, The exhibit, on the museum’s main floor center and north galleries, runs through December 30, 2024.

Hartmann, left, and O’Malley preview the exhibit April 30.

Sponsors of the exhibit are the Arch W. Shaw Foundation, Racine Community Foundation, WE Energies Foundation and the Racine Arts Council.

The museum is located at 701 Main Street in Racine. Museum hours are: Tuesday-Friday 10am-5pm, Saturday 10am-3pm, Sunday Noon-4pm.  Admission is free. The museum, built as a Carnegie Library in 1904, is a historically preserved building and is not ADA accessible. For more information call the museum at 262-636-3296 or visit their website, www.racineheritagemuseum.org

“Wright in Racine” was allowed to document the installation of the exhibit:

Museum curator Allison Barr was instrumental in putting the exhibit together.

Please scroll down to see previous posts on this blog or website…

 

 

What is in the U-Haul Truck?

© Mark Hertzberg (2023)

I could tell you a lot. And I could post lots of photos, but I won’t yet. For now, this is a teaser. Suffice it to say the “stuff” in the truck is “stuff” for an exciting exhibit about Frank Lloyd Wright and Cecil Corwin that will run at the Racine, Wisconsin, Heritage Museum until December 2024. The museum is at 701 Main Street in downtown Racine.

The exhibit is comprised of artifacts from the collection of the incomparable Tim Samuelson, the Cultural Historian Emeritus for the City of Chicago. It has been in the planning since late 2021.

Tim Samuelson, left, David Jameson, and Eric O’Malley work in Samuelson’s archives as they prepare an exhibit about Alfonso Iannelli at the Racine Heritage Museum in 2018.

The exhibit was slated to open May 2, but there have been some unexpected hiccups which will likely delay the opening until later in the week. So, as the cliche goes, “Watch this space for updates.”

https://www.racineheritagemuseum.org

Please scroll down to view earlier posts on this blog or website.

Hardy: Light, Shapes, Shadows

Photos © Mark Hertzberg (2023)

One of my favorite things in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Thomas P. Hardy House (1904/05) in Racine, Wisconsin, is the bank of seven windows in the front hall. I am taken both by the design – Robert McCarter has written that the floor plan of the house is articulated in white* – but particularly how the shadow of the pattern is projected into, and around, the front hall by the afternoon sun.

The first photo, below, is a file photo of one of the original windows (the windows have since been replicated and replaced). It was protected from vandals, who had previously thrown stones at it, by a layer of plastic. Next, are photos of the patterns I was delighted to find yesterday afternoon when I stopped to drop something off at the house.

*The square in the middle represents the public spaces (the two story living room and the dining room below it) and the thin rectangle that bisects it shows us the private family rooms at both ends of the house.

Please scroll down to read previous posts on this blog or website.

Wright Books + 1 + 1

© Mark Hertzberg (2023)

Sometimes the night does things to you. I woke up at 4:30 this morning reconsidering my last post in terms of what I wrote about Elizabeth Wright Heller’s book, The Architect’s Sister – The Story of My Life (Brushy Creek Publishing Co.: Iowa City, 2019). There are arguably two ways to interpret the title, and it occurs to me that I did it wrong. I took it to mean the book would tell us about “The Architect,” which it does not do in much detail. It does tell us in vivid detail about Frank Lloyd Wright’s star crossed father, William Carey Wright. And that is important in the canon of Wright.

William Carey Wright was both a musician – which is certainly something that led to Frank’s love of music – and a minister. Sadly he could not hold a pulpit long, and the family was itinerant. His first wife (Heller’s mother) died and his second marriage, to Anna, was a nightmare. I did not give enough weight to Heller’s description of Anna’s abuse of her. The divorce petition filed by William Carey Wright is chilling. The divorce left young Frank with his domineering mother.

We are as familiar with Frank and his flaws as we are with his architecture. We do not escape our childhoods. How much did Anna shape Frank’s personality? How much did she poison her son against his father?

While most of Heller’s book is about her life other than growing up, and she did not know Frank well, after rethinking my essay, I now recommend you read it to get a better understanding of Frank’s lesser known parent, the father we have been led to forget about.

Frank was drawn to Cecil Corwin when Frank moved to Chicago. They had a very close relationship. Corwin’s father, Eli, was also a preacher. He was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Racine, Wisconsin from 1880 – 1888. Frank’s first commission in Racine was his unrealized 1901 commission to remodel Herbert and Flora Miles’ house. The commission had first gone to Corwin two years earlier. We do not know how Wright and Thomas P. Hardy met (the Hardy House, 1904/05 was Wright’s first realized commission in Racine), but it is entirely possible that it came about through the Corwin – Racine / Corwin – Wright connection. Two architects, two fathers who were preachers.

So, make it Wright Books  +1 + 1.

The Racine Heritage Museum will be mounting a long-term exhibit curated by Tim Samuelson that reprises his 2020 “Wright Before the Lloyd” exhibit in Elmhurst, Illinois. The emphasis on the Racine exhibit will be on Corwin and Wright. The museum is located just two blocks from the Henry Mitchell House (1894) which, though in Corwin’s name, is likely a collaboration between Corwin and Wright. Details will be announced.

Scroll down for previous posts.

Wright Books: + 1

© Mark Hertzberg (2023)

How many books about Frank Lloyd Wright are enough, or too many?

When I ordered a copy of Jonathan Adams’s new book, Frank Lloyd Wright – The Architecture of Defiance (The University of Wales Press: Cardiff, 2023), I thought of something the late Sam Johnson, then Chairman Emeritus of SC Johnson, said to me when I showed him my “Wright in Racine” photo presentation and told him my idea for a book about Wright’s built and unbuilt work in Racine. Sam’s father, H.F. Johnson Jr. had commissioned Wright to design the SC Johnson buildings and Wingspread, among others, and Sam grew up in Wingspread. My heart sank when he said, “The world does not need another book about Frank Lloyd Wright.” Then he added, “But it does need a book about his work in Racine.”

I do not feel the need to read, much less own, every single book about Wright. So, does the World of Wright need yet another book about him? I would posit that it does need this one. Adams’s book is one of five Wright books I know of being published this year. It is the third in a series of books commissioned in 2016 by the Royal Society of Architects in Wales, exploring the architecture of Wales. It shines a bright light on Wright’s Welsh roots, and the family he grew from.

Much of the Wright history in the book is familiar to those of us in America who have had dozens of books about Wright at our disposal. We are not the primary audience for this book. Forget about the familiar people you correspond with in America about Wright and see at Wright conferences, because Defiance was commissioned and published in Wales, 5500 miles east of Taliesin. Taliesin is, of course, a Welsh word, an homage to Wright’s maternal ancestry in Wales. Wright also gave  Welsh names to the Bradley House (Glenlloyd) in Kankakee, Illinois, and to the Fred B. Jones estate (Penwern) on Delavan Lake, Wisconsin. The latter is particularly important to me; we will get to that shortly.

Many people can recite their Wright knowledge backwards, forward, and inside out, but how much do they know about what may have made Wright what he was? What do we know other than the old saws about his character flaws? We know that Wright’s mother, Anna (nee Hannah) came from Wales as a child with her parents, Mallie and Richard Lloyd Jones. Adams takes us in great detail through their arduous eight month journey from their Welsh homestead to Ixonia, Wisconsin. Their voyage and her pioneer life in Wisconsin molded her, and shaped who she would be as Wright’s mother.

Last year Mary Rogers sent me a copy of her great-grandmother Elizabeth Wright Heller’s book The Architect’s Sister – The Story of My Life (Brushy Creek Publishing Co.: Iowa City, 2019). Heller’s father was William Carey Wright, making her Frank Lloyd Wright’s half-sister. Heller writes about how her step-mother Anna Wright physically and emotionally abused her. She lived it, but Adams has a different take. Georgia Lloyd Jones Snoke, Wright’s first cousin, twice removed, offers this perspective, “The way Jonathan explored that portion of Anna’s life made Anna more, not less, human. To have achieved a prestigious teaching degree (at immense emotional and intellectual expense) and to have given it up for a mismatched marriage would have caused a brilliant and ambitious woman more than a little angst. Just how she took it out on her step children is—at best— questionable.” Heller’s recollections were written decades after they happened and long after Anna died. Is the truth with the person who lived it, recalling it years later, or not?

Snoke and I began corresponding with Adams two years ago because he was including Penwern in his book. I had relied on speculation from Wright scholar Jack Holzhueter in my book about Penwern that Wright had persuaded his American client Jones to name his estate after Pen-y-Wern, the Wright ancestral home in Wales (Frank Lloyd Wright’s Penwern: A Summer Estate – Wisconsin Historical Society Press: Madison, 2019). Snoke had kindly given me photos for the book that her husband, Kenneth Snoke, had taken of what they thought was Pen-y-Wern during one of the trips to Wales.

Adams contributes several important facts to our understanding of the Wisconsin Penwern. First, he documents a trip that Anna Wright and her daughter Maginel made to the ancestral home in 1900, concurrent with the design of Penwern. While there is no piece of paper that ties together the names Pen-y-Wern and Penwern, their visit adds significant weight to Holzhueter’s speculation about the origin of Penwern’s name. Second, he found documentation that there had been marshes near Delavan Lake. While I had written that “Penwern” can mean “at the head of the alder tree” and there were alder trees near the lake, Adams writes that, more accurately, the word means “above the marsh.”

And, finally, he documented that the Pen-y-Wern that the Snokes visited 20 years ago is not the one that Richard Lloyd and Mallie Jones emigrated from. He sent us a photo of the actual cottage, long since demolished. The photograph, taken from Chester Lloyd Jones’s 1938 book, Youngest Son, shows marshland below the cottage.

Mallie Jones, Courtesy of Georgia Lloyd Jones Snoke

The book jumps around chronologically, which perplexes me, but I did not let that become an obstacle to my reading. While the book is thoroughly and impressively researched and footnoted, I wish to set the record straight on two small points regarding Penwern. Adams names the steward of the estate as Frederick Jones. His name was Fred B. Jones, not Frederick. And, Adams speculates that Ward W. Willits (of Wright’s Willits House in Highland Park, Illinois) was an early visitor to Penwern. Willits and Jones worked together and I have placed Willits on Delavan Lake in 1895 and speculated that he suggested that Jones build his summer “cottage” there five years later, but his name was never mentioned in the extensive newspaper records of visitors to Penwern.

There are two ways to think of the title of Heller’s book. It is literally true. But it can be thought of as misleading, because there is scant reference to Wright himself. She was, literally, his half-sister, but while she writes about her apparently single visit to Taliesin, and about her father, and Wright’s and the family’s itinerant life while he was alive, the book is more her interesting life story than about Frank Lloyd Wright.

I am an avid bicyclist. Bicyclists often joke that if “X” is the number of bicycles one owns, “X + 1” is the ideal number of bicycles to own. Jonathan Adams’s book is worth a “+1” in the canon of Wright literature.

Scroll up for an updated reconsidered post about Heller’s book

Scroll down for previous articles on my website 

A Late Summer Evening at Wingspread

© Mark Hertzberg (2023)

I do not always edit photos immediately after taking them. This happens, and then that happens, and, well, sometimes photos languish in a “to be edited” folder on my computer desktop. A bout of insomnia early this morning led me to finally tackle some photos taken at Wingspread on one of the last summer evenings last year, September 15. I was meeting the team of a strategic planning group that I was going to address the next morning when I took these photos, and that presentation was top of mind for me. Then I got caught up covering the fall elections. And then we took a trip to Oaxaca and Puebla. And then, well, you get it, stuff comes up and photos get forgotten.

It is also a challenge to find fresh photos of a location you have been privileged to photograph many times, but I found a handful of photos to share with you.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed Wingspread in Wind Point, Wisconsin for H.F. Johnson Jr. in 1937, the year after he designed the S.C. Johnson Administration Building in Racine for Johnson. The 14,000 sq. ft. house became home to The Johnson Foundation in 1959.

Upstairs, Downstairs with Wright

Photos © Mark Hertzberg

I may have stumbled on one of the only aspects of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work that has not been mulled over (and over and over) when I was editing pictures I had taken in October during the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy Conference in Chicago. Taking pictures in the lobby of The Rookery Building on LaSalle Street was a bit like the proverbial “shooting fish in a barrel.” You couldn’t miss. I started digging in my files to see what other photos I had that show how Wright moved people up and down in his buildings. Some ideas are repeated. The photos are presented in chronological order of design:

Charnley House, Chicago (1891):

Penwern (Fred B. Jones Estate), Delavan Lake, Wisconsin (1900-1903):

Thomas P. Hardy House, Racine (1904/05):

The Rookery Building, Chicago (1905)

Avery Coonley Estate, Riverside, Illinois (1908):

American System-Built Duplex in the Burnham Block, Milwaukee (1916):

Fallingwater, Mill Run, Pennsylvania (1935):

SC Johnson Administration Building, Racine, Wisconsin (1936)…stairs from the Great Workroom down to the women’s lounge:

Stairs from The Great Workroom up to the Mezzanine:

Wingspread (Herbert Johnson House), Wind Point, Wisconsin (1937)…stairs to the second floor:

Stairs to the Crow’s Nest lookout tower (these look like the one’s to the women’s lounge at the Administration Building designed the previous year):

SC Johnson Research Tower, Racine, Wisconsin (1943/44):

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin (1956):

Guggenheim Museum, New York City (1956):

Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, California (1957):

My thanks to SC  Johnson for giving me access to photograph their stairs today for this blog post.

Scroll down for earlier posts, including the recent “Frank Lloyd Wright in the Abstract.”

 

 

 

 

Wright in the Abstract

Photos © Mark Hertzberg (2022)

I had to edit 34,575 Frank Lloyd Wright building images (or 185.62 GB) down to 30 photos for an exhibit.

Here’s the backstory: Lake Forest (Illinois) College, my alma mater, honored me with two concurrent exhibits this month for my 50th anniversary Homecoming. Rebecca Goldberg, Lecturer in Art and Director of the Gallery in the Romanesque Durand Art Institute building, initially asked me just to include a handful of my Frank Lloyd Wright work in an exhibit of my career in photojournalism. I found it hard to edit the Wright work down to just four or so photos. Fortunately there was enough space in two galleries to mount two separate exhibits, each with 30 prints. I decided to pick mostly abstract interpretations of Wright’s work than show perhaps predictable building photos. My selection is below, in alphabetical order of the commissions:

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, 1956

Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida, 1938

Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida, 1938

Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida, 1938

Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 1943

Hillside Drafting Room, Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1933

Hollyhock House, Los Angeles, 1919

Imperial Hotel entry way, Tokyo, 1915, as rebuilt at Meiji Mura near Nagoya, Japan

Lindholm Service Station, Cloquet, Minnesota, 1956

Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, California, 1957

Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, California, 1957

Meyer May House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1908

Meyer May House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1908

Meyer May House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1908

Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1952

Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1952

Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1952

Romeo and Juliet Windmill, Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1898

SC Johnson Administration Building, Racine, Wisconsin, 1936

SC Johnson Administration Building, Racine, Wisconsin, 1936

SC Johnson Administration Building, Racine, Wisconsin, 1936

SC Johnson Research Tower, Racine, Wisconsin, 1943/44

Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911, 1925

Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911, 1925

Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911, 1925

Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911, 1925

Thomas P. Hardy House, Racine, Wisconsin, 1904/05

Wingspread, Wind Point, Wisconsin, 1937

Wingspread, Wind Point, Wisconsin, 1937

Now, as for those 34,575 images…if I had time to go through them, a good chunk could be deleted. But who has time to do that?

Hours for the gallery…the show runs through October 30:

https://www.lakeforest.edu/academics/majors-and-minors/art-and-art-history/art-galleries

Keep scrolling down for previous posts on the website…

Taliesin’s Royalty

© Mark Hertzberg

(Disclaimer: there is no scholarly content to this post)

The real royalty at Taliesin is four-legged.

First, we present Percy (Hamblen), giving me “the eye” as I stride toward Minerva Montooth’s apartment to meet her new companion:

Next, we present “Lucy,” short for Lucinda, Montooth, Minerva Montooth’s new dog. No dog can replace Fifi, but Minerva has a new companion:

Both photos are from September 9, 2022.

Keep scrolling down for previous posts on the website. I will soon post photo from my “Frank Lloyd Wright in the Abstract” exhibit which is at Durand Art Institute at Lake Forest College through the end of October.