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

 

 

 

 

Unity Temple – A Visual Interpretation

(c) Mark Hertzberg (2020)

Many people define Frank Lloyd Wright’s career by his residential architecture and how it often embraced the surrounding landscape. His public buildings are no less important. In contrast to his residential architecture, they turn to the inside, sheltering the worshippers or workers inside from the noise and grit of the neighborhood.

I was invited to photograph Unity Temple in Oak Park a year ago by Heidi Ruehle, Executive Director of the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation, at the annual Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy conference. I took her up on her invitation this week. I purposely did not look at other photographs of the building – especially the contemporary ones in Robert McCarter’s monograph for Phaidon’s Architecure in Detail series (1997) before my own photographic exploration of the building. Details of  books about Unity Temple are in a bibliography at the conclusion of this article.

Before you look at how I saw Unity Temple, consider Paul Hendrickson’s words in his book “Plagued by Fire:” “No single piece of Wright architecture moves me more. . . .In a way it’s like emerging from the tunnels of an old ballpark and feeling overwhelmed by the sight of the perfect napkin of clipped sunlit green before you. Only it’s as if the ‘diamond’ has somehow been suspended in air.”

Made of poured concrete, and built between 1906 and 1908, Unity Temple stands in striking contrast to the typical church of the day. The commission for Unity Temple came because Unity Church, its predecessor building (1872) burned down in 1905 after its steeple was stuck by lightning (historic photos courtesy of Unity Temple Restoration Foundation):

Oh, what a stir Mr. Wright’s church made! Consider that when First United Church of Oak Park built its new home across the street from Unity Temple in 1918, two years after its first home burned down, it chose a traditional ecclesiastical design:

First United, framed by Unity Temple’s concrete walls

Wright’s powerful, non-traditional design surely startled congregants when they came to Unity Temple for the first time. Unitarian Universalists challenge many of society’s accepted norms, so why shouldn’t their church challenge traditional architecture? The lack of fenestration – except for clerestory windows – gives no hint of what lies inside.

As congregants walk in the “front” door, on what would traditionally be considered the side of the building, they read words that embody the Unitarian ideal: For the worship of God [the temple] and the service of man [the fellowship hall]:

It is indeed a “path of discovery” or “compression and release” to repeat oft-used phrases to describe entry into Wright buildings.Wright brings us into a foyer with a low ceiling. Unity House, a fellowship hall and Sunday school space, is clearly visible to our right.

The church itself is to our left – but we cannot see the sanctuary. We first go into a narrow hallway, turn, and then up several steps into the sanctuary. Hendrickson’s baseball analogy is vivid. This is the view before we ascend to the sanctuary:

Or, on a visit like mine, Ruehle will open the doors hidden in a panel behind the pulpit, through which congregants leave after services, and let us peek in:

Panoramic phone-camera photos show the sanctuary before we explore the architecture in greater detail:

Although we are attracted to the building’s architecture – it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019 –  we must not forget that the building was designed as a house of worship:

The minister’s lectern, and the view from the pulpit:

The stucco walls and wood trim draw one’s eyes up to the ceiling and light fixtures:

I am gobsmacked by the intricate detail in the hanging and wiring of the lights:

And then the sun made the ceiling glow:

Unity House: A fireplace is opposite us as we enter the hall. Ruehle explains that there was supposed to be a mural around the lower part. I told her that it reminded me a bit of the front of the Winslow House (which I was going to photograph that afternoon):

A sign in one of the classrooms upstairs speaks as much to Wright’s landmark design as it does to the students!

Unity Temple Restoration Foundation Web Site:

https://www.utrf.org

@flwunitytemple

Bibliography…and I urge you to try a local bookshop before reflexively ordering from the Big A:

Hendrickson, Paul, Plagued by Fire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).

McCarter, Robert: Unity Temple – Frank Lloyd Wright – Architecture in Detail Series (London: Phaidon Press, 1997).

Siry, Joseph M.: Unity Temple – Frank Lloyd Wright and Architecture for Liberal Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Sokol, David: The Noble Room – The Inspired Conception and Tumultuous Creation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple (Top Five Books, 2008).