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…

Vox: SCJ and Hardy

© Mark Hertzberg (2022)

Phil Edwards, who makes wonderful Wright multi-media pieces at Vox, contacted me this summer about a piece he was going to produce about the SC Johnson Administration Building in August. He asked about the Hardy House, which is just five blocks east of SC Johnson. Hardy House steward Tom Szymczak graciously gave me permission to take Edwards inside the house and film there when he came to Racine.

The piece just went live and it has an interesting perspective at the end. I welcome your comments. You do have to bear with some ads…which pay the bill , making Edwards’ endeavors possible. It is very, very, very well produced as is a previous piece he did about the Pope-Leighy House. Here is a link to the SCJ / Hardy piece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb-kYt1lpnI

I leave you with a photo I took when we were in the Hardy House…a reflection of one of the front hall windows seen in one of the living room windows, across the house. What a brilliant detail!

Hardy House: Gene Szymczak + 10

© Mark Hertzberg (2022)

Saturday’s afternoon sun projected the pattern of the entry hall windows onto the walls. Robert McCarter writes that the floor plan of the house is articulated in the windows.

Yesterday, September 17, marked the 10th anniversary of Eugene (Gene) Szymczak becoming the seventh steward of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Thomas P. Hardy House (1904-05) in Racine, Wisconsin. Gene fell ill and died December 3, 2016 after undertaking an extensive rehabilitation of the house. Its new stewards are Tom (one of Gene’s two brothers) and Joan Szymczak. Tom and Joan invited family to a low-key celebration of the anniversary on the dining room terrace yesterday. Anne Sporer Ruetz, who grew up in the house from 1938 – 1947 and two non-family couples were also invited.

Gene signs papers transferring stewardship of the house to him, September 17, 2012.

I took Gene through the house, which was challenged, when he was considering buying it in 2012. As we left, he said to me, “I don’t have children. This is something I could do for Racine.” The late John G. Thorpe of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy advised me to step back and let professional appraisers and others take over. I understood, but I wanted Jim and Margaret Yoghourtjian, the longtime stewards of the house to first meet Gene. I told Gene what kind of pastry to bring Margaret (chocolate-covered marzipan loaves). He also brought them a Japanese print reminsicent of a famous drawing by Marion Mahony of their house. We were having lemonade and cashews in their new apartment when Gene surprised us and made them an offer for the house. There was a glitch though, or so I thought, when the week before the closing Gene emailed me that he was having second thoughts…it would make a good teardown and he could build something with a three car garage underneath. I held off calling the Yoghourtjians to cancel the sale so I could get hold of Gene. It was two days before he called me back, from Baltimore Washington Airport, on his way to visit Fallingwater, “Just kidding!”

Anne has often told me that it was like watching movies when the pattern of the leaded glass windows was projected onto her bedroom ceiling and walls by the headlights of passing cars at night. She was delighted that the “movies” were playing in full force in the entry way as we arrived at the celebration yesterday:

Anne was a celebrity yesterday: one of the guests had brought a copy of my book about the Hardy House (Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hardy House, Pomegranate: 2006) and asked her to sign two pages with photos related to her:

This photo of Anne’s 14th birthday party at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed dining room ensemble (which was lost after her parents sold the house) was in the Racine newspaper in 1946. She is holding the cake at the head of the table.

Coincidental with the celebration, a new Wright website, which I was not familiar with, pinged this morning to a piece I posted in 2014 about Gene’s work at the house:

https://wrightinracine.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/hardy-house-restoration/

The new website is:

https://franklloydwrightsites.com/hardyhouse/

Gene was honored with a Wright Spirit Award from the Building Conservancy in 2015, and the Kristin Visser Award for Historic Preservation in 2017.

I posted this piece a year ago when Anne and David Archer, who grew up in the house between 1947 – 1957 were reunited at the house:

https://wrightinracine.wordpress.com/2021/06/13/hardy-homecomings/

I challenge myself each time I visit a familiar Wright site to find something new to photograph. A week ago, before I was escorting my fourth Road Scholar tour of the summer, I told my wife that I was having trouble seeing anything new the first three tours of this year and was almost considering not even bringing a camera with me (these were my 10th – 13th tour with the same itinerary since 2017). I looked up as I was bringing our guests down to the dining room and looked at the bottom of the stairs to the living room for the first time. Out came the phone camera:

The Road Scholar “Architectural Masterworks of Frank Lloyd Wright” tour is a week-long and begins in Chicago:

https://www.roadscholar.org/find-an-adventure/22976/architectural-masterworks-of-frank-lloyd-wright

Fifi Montooth, 2010 – 2022

© Mark Hertzberg

There will no longer be a bark to announce visitors when they knock on Minerva Montooth’s door at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin. Fifi has died. The legacy spirit of Taliesin has been diminished.

A Spring Evening at Penwern

© Mark Hertzberg

Fred B. Jones commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design Penwern, a magnificent estate on the South Shore of Delavan Lake, Wisconsin in 1900-1903. Wright designed five homes and a yacht club on the lake, but Penwern was his most expansive commission there: Wright designed not only the “cottage” (the main house), but also a boathouse, stable, and gate lodge.

This is the only known photo of Jones at Penwern. He is thought to be about 65 years old when it was taken, around 1923. Courtesy Sue and John Major

Entertaining friends is the theme that unites all of Penwern’s stewards. Jones was a Chicago business executive. He enjoyed entertaining at his summer home until he died in 1933 at age 75. Boating is an obvious form of recreation, but one of the signature features of Penwern is the tower at one end of the porte-cochère. The room at the end of the walkway from the main house, a walkway above the porte-cochère, was the room where Jones and friends played poker.

Sue and John Major host a party every July 4.

Burr Robbins, in white suit, often hosted business clients. He and his wife, Peg, became the second stewards of Penwern in 1939. Courtesy Ross Robbins

John O’Shea hosted an “Aloha! Party” in 1994 when he sold Penwern to the Majors. Photo courtesy of John O’Shea.

Sue and John Major became the stewards of Penwern in 1994. Their rehabilitation of the estate is well known in Wright circles: they removed the two unsightly 1909 and 1910 non-Wright additions that Jones commissioned; in 2005 they rebuilt the boathouse which had burned down in 1978 in an arson fire, working from a single sheet of Wright’s plans; they finished John O’Shea’s project to have the three main porches have round outer walls, per Wright’s plans; they overhauled the stable and gate lodge…and anything else dilapidated or altered. Let’s consider the boathouse:

This is how the foundation of the boathouse looked until 2005. Courtesy Bill Orkild

This is the sheet of drawings that Bill Orkild and architects had to work from. © 2022 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art / Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

When wizard contractor Bill Orkild was asked by the Majors to look at a small project shortly after they bought Penwern, he says, his father warned him that this small project might become a full time career. His father was prescient. As if the work outlined above weren’t accomplishments enough, and as if routine maintenance of the estate isn’t enough, the Majors came up with yet another restoration challenge in 2020, which brings us to a spring evening at Penwern in 2022. Jones loved growing roses, and Wright gave him a commercially-built greenhouse attached to the gate lodge water tower, right:

© 2022 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art / Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Members of the caretakers’ family are shown near the greenhouse, in a photo taken ca. 1935. Photo courtesy of Betty Schacht.

The greenhouse had deteriorated by the 1970s and was replaced with a carport by Terry Canty, the Robbins’ daughter:

Photo courtesy of Bill Orkild

The Majors had Orkild remove the carport, but for years the space looked like a Jack o-lantern with a missing tooth:

There was, of course, only one Major / Orkild solution, and that was to rebuild the greenhouse in 2020. Plans were drawn by DePietro Associates:

The Majors made one significant change. Rather than use the greenhouse as, literally, a greenhouse, it would be a place to entertain friends. Work started before, and continued through the early days of the Pandemic. Finally, in 2022 it was time for the new greenhouse to shine, and shine it did on June 4 when the Majors hosted a benefit evening for the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy:

Guests at the benefit came from across the country. The evening started with a boat tour on the lake, giving guests a lake-side view of the five Wright homes including the A.P. Johnson House:

Kimberly Valentine, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, left; Debi and Ted Muntz, Loveness House, Stillwater, Minnesota.

Barbara Gordon, Executive Director, Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, left; Paul May and Heidi Ruehle (Ruehle is Executive Director Unity Temple Restoration Foundation); Chuck Henderson, Walker House, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California; Steve and Debra Poe, William E. Martin House, Oak Park.

The boat tour was followed by an elegant gourmet dinner in the dining room. Note the dining room sideboard which was painted white, as was all the dining room trim, in the photo of Burr Robbins. Orkild restored it:

Courtesy Bill Orkild

Courtesy Bill Orkild

Then it was off to the greenhouse for dessert:

And so, through the Majors generous gesture for the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, ended another evening as Jones envisioned Penwern, friends gathered together on the shore of his beloved Delavan Lake.

Links:

Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy:

https://savewright.org

Penwern website:

https://penwern.com

Continue to scroll down to read previous articles on http://www.wrightinracine.com

 

 

 

 

Writing Wright with Light, Part Two

Photos © Mark Hertzberg

This is the last day of the Road Scholar Frank Lloyd Wright trip which I am accompanying. Today I found myself looking at shapes in the six Wright sites we visited. I relied on memory to try to not repeat photos I have taken in the past. I was challenged to turn this post into a “Where Was I When I Took This Photo?” game rather than caption photos as I normally would. The photos are presented in the order in which we visited the sites. The answers are at the bottom.

Site A:

Site B:

Site C:

Site D:

Site E:

Site F:

Answers:

A: Jacobs 1 House – The odd shaped bricks are attributed to Wright reportedly having his apprentices use bricks taken from the SC Johnson Administration Building. There are 200 shapes of bricks in the Administration Building. B: Unitarian Meeting House C: Wyoming Valley School D: Hillside School E: Hillside Drafting Room F: Taliesin

Thank you to Taliesin Preservation for greeting us at the Visitors Center with this sign:

Scroll down to see yesterday’s “Writing Wright with Light” post, and previous blog articles.