Altruism x 2 at the Bagley House

© Mark Hertzberg (2024)

Altruism: Unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others: charitable acts motivated purely by altruism – www.merriam-webster.com

Examples: Grace Bagley (1860-1944) and Safina Uberoi and Lukas Ruecker (Contemporary)

Safina Uberoi – photo courtesy of Safina Uberoi

Lukas Ruecker at the Bagley House

Safina Uberoi, President of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy board, and Lukas Ruecker became stewards of Wright’s Tonkens House in Cincinnati in 2015. In 2022 they added Wright’s Bagley House (1894) in Hinsdale, Illinois to their Wright portfolio when they bought – and likely saved – the house which faced demolition, possibly so another “McMansion” could be built. The house has had numerous owners and alterations but its bones are important as one of Wright’s first designs after he left Adler & Sullivan the year before.

Lukas Ruecker, right, and Safina Uberoi with Jeff and Jeannette, Goldstone, the  previous owners of the Bagley House – photo courtesy of Safina Uberoi

Uberoi and Ruecker are working with restoration architect Douglas Gilbert to restore the Bagley House. The most visible change, as visitors approach the house, will be that the white aluminum siding will be taken off and stained shingle siding – some of it original – will once again envelop the house. The aluminum siding is thought to date to the 1940s or 1950s.

Some of the original siding is under the aluminum siding.

Before the aluminum siding was put on – Courtesy Hinsdale Historical Society

The 1980s addition on the back of the house will be taken down, replaced by a new addition designed by architects George Suyama and Jay Deguchi. They are very familiar with Wright’s work; Suyama is a former Building Conservancy board member. Uberoi describes the new addition, “…which provides additional living space at the rear of the plot while touching the Bagley House respectfully at only one point and making no changes to the original building.”

The addition to the rear of the house will be taken off.

Safina Uberoi with Jay Deguchi and George Suyama – Photo courtesy of Safina Uberoi

Gilbert elaborates on the overall program, “The plan is to restore the exterior to the original design by Wright, so the Bagley era.  For the interior, only the main floor living spaces will be restored to the original design, with back-of-house spaces altered to accommodate modern needs and the connections with the new wing. The second floor will be reworked for modern living.  The 1980s addition on the back goes away and the original rear porch rebuilt.  That porch will look out over a courtyard/terrace of the new wing.  The nice thing about the new wing design is that the two will barely touch each other and will instead have more of a dialogue with each other (as opposed to just shooting straight off the back like most additions do).”

Thanks to the rescue of the house, the distinguished career of Wright’s client, social reformer and suffragette Grace Bagley (1860-1944), is getting fresh attention. Both the house and Bagley’s career were highlighted at an event hosted by the Building Conservancy in December. Uberoi and Ruecker commissioned architectural historians Julia Bachrach and Jean Follett to research Bagley’s work on behalf of economically disadvantaged people in Chicago as part of the process of having the house declared an architectural landmark in Hinsdale. Their research was displayed on richly illustrated story panels for “Finding Grace,” a public exhibit in the house late last year. Bagley helped many Italian immigrant families – some living in a tenement in the Levee District her husband, Frederick, owned. She also helped ensure that juvenile offenders would no longer be imprisoned with adults criminals and volunteered at Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago.

The “Finding Grace” exhibit at the Bagley House

The unanticipated consequences of Uberoi and Ruecker’s purchase of the house include another yet another discovery about Wright’s work through Bachrach and Follett’s research. Like the Bagley House, Wright’s Stephen A. Foster cottage in the West Pullman neighborhood on Chicago’s far south side (1900) was designed as a summer cottage for the client. The surprise that Bachrach and Follett discovered was that Mrs. Bagley and Mrs. Foster were sisters.

The Stephen Foster Cottage

There is some similarity in the Bagley House design to Cecil Corwin’s Henry Mitchell House in Racine (also 1894) which Wright is thought to have helped Corwin design. [I have a special interest in the Mitchell House because I live in Racine and have researched some of its history]. Both houses are included in Tim Samuelson’s “Wright Before the Lloyd” exhibit at the Racine Heritage Museum which runs through the end of 2024. Both are Dutch Colonial.

The Mitchell House in 1895 – Courtesy Racine Heritage Museum

Both have a library at either end of the house. Mitchell’s is semi-circular, the octagonal one in Bagley brings to mind the octagonal office space in Wright’s Home and Studio.

The Mitchell House library

The Bagley House library

The two commissions are listed just a few lines apart in the March 1894 Journal of the Inland Architect.

I am an avid bicyclist. There is a maxim in the cycling community that if X equals the number of bicycles one owns, then the ideal number of bicycles to own is X + 1. Perhaps the same maxim is appropriate in the World of Frank Lloyd Wright for Safina Uberoi and Lukas Ruecker!

Finding Grace Exhibit and Travel Schedule:

https://sites.google.com/view/finding-grace?fbclid=IwAR0AIEau6Qlixvytn5s-ZIY93L1HGtFoJAkL1COFXEiH6Eq4Jr07KDjVl68

Architectural Digest story about Bagley and Foster house connections:

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/two-early-frank-lloyd-wright-homes-have-a-surprising-link-that-was-just-discovered

Julia Bachrach on the Bagley House:

https://www.jbachrach.com/blog/2022/9/29/the-bagley-house-one-of-frank-lloyd-wrights-earliest-independent-commissions

Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy:

www.savewright.org

Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy on Bagley House, Grace Bagley, 2024 exhibit information:

https://savewright.org/celebrating-preservation-at-the-bagley-house/

Racine Heritage Museum “Wright Before the Lloyd” Exhibit:

https://wrightinracine.wordpress.com/2023/05/04/wright-before-the-lloyd/

Mitchell House: Corwin / Wright’s Coda?

https://wrightinracine.wordpress.com/2021/07/08/mitchell-house-corwin-wrights-coda/

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Wright Bookshelf June 2023

© Mark Hertzberg (2023)

There are two new books to consider adding to your Frank Lloyd Wright bookshelf: Kristine Hansen’s Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wisconsin: How America’s Most Famous Architect Found Inspiration in His Home State (Globe Pequot Press, 2023) and the catalogue that accompanies the “Wright Before the ‘Lloyd’: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Search for Himself” exhibit at the Racine, Wisconsin, Heritage Museum, published by the museum.

(As a journalist I believe in disclaimers…Hansen worked as a reporting intern at the Racine newspaper in the 1990s when I was Director of Photography there. After she contacted me when she was writing her book, I introduced her to Minerva Montooth and stewards, past and present, of the Hardy House, A.P. Johnson House, Keland House, and Penwern. She quotes me extensively, drawing from my books, and used a number of my photographs.)

Hansen at Boswell Books in Milwaukee on June 9. Her mother, left, beams in the front row.

Hansen described her book as a “guidebook” rather than an “academic” book in an email to me. That is an apt description. She is a travel writer based in Milwaukee and became aware that Wright’s work in his home state is not as well known as, say, Fallingwater, to people across the country who do not live and breathe Frank Lloyd Wright every waking moment. The book is rich in anecdotal descriptions and histories of many of Wright’s commissions in Wisconsin, as well as several Wisconsin buildings by other architects, including by Wright apprentices James Dresser. and John Rattenbury.

Her Introduction was born during a traditional Wisconsin Friday night fish fry when someone asked her, “Who was Frank Lloyd Wright?” Then,  “I realized that most people connect Wright with his architectural projects but not necessarily his character and personality.” Fortunately, the book concentrates on his work, rather than rehashing the same-old, same-old about what a difficult man he was. I know several Wright clients who passionately disputed that characterization of Wright, so best to move on from that.

Although there is a listing of all of Wright’s Wisconsin commissions, along biographical notes about his life, in the three page “Timeline of Frank Lloyd Wright in Wisconsin” chronology in the front of the book, the text is not inclusive of all of them. “My dream book would have been to include every project Wright designed in Wisconsin. I actually did not want to discriminate. But some people did not get back to me and as they are stewards of private homes I didn’t think it would be fair to have a chapter about a house without interviewing the person who lived in it, especially in contrast to chapters where I interviewed the stewards of other homes,” Hansen wrote me.

I emailed her about the subtitle of the book, writing her that I thought the book shows what came out of his inspiration rather than how he was inspired by his home state.  She replied, “In my talks I am further addressing this question, such as how growing up on so many acres of land likely led to his organic-architecture philosophy. If this were a more academic book, and not a guidebook, I might have included a chapter that answers this question in essay form, pulling together the tenets of each project.”

There are a few errors in the first edition, which sold out quickly. Although Hansen caught them when proofing the book, her editor did not correct them before going to press. She has been assured that they have been corrected for a second printing due out in July.

I come from a visual background, so I look at more than the narrative of a book. How is it presented to the reader? Several aspects of the design and production of the book are disappointing. I wish each chapter included the date of the commission in the heading and, in the case of the non-Wright buildings, the name of the architect, rather than introducing his name lower down, in the narrative. (Hansen breaks with convention by using the date of completion for the buildings rather than the accepted practice of the date of its design.) The book’s designer included some completely and partially blank pages in the book. The “Statewide” chapter about the Wright in Wisconsin organization has four photos which are not captioned. I recognize one as Wright’s Lamp House in Madison, but I have to guess at the names of the buildings and non-Wright architects of the other three from the text. The quality of the photo reproduction varies from excellent to poor. Muddy tones in some of the darker photos would not be hard to correct.

Scholarly treatises about Wright’s work abound, and I am aware of at least two more in the pipeline. Hansen’s book is for a different audience. It is a good overview of Wright’s work in Wisconsin for a general audience that is not going to delve into endnotes and debate about his work ad infinitum. A Wright scholar criticized one of my books for being too anecdotal. On the contrary, I replied, I believe that it is important to let Wright’s clients and the stewards of his homes tell how they experience his architecture, how they live and work in his buildings. Hansen’s book accomplishes that through her dogged efforts as a journalist to track down her subjects.

To order: https://www.boswellbooks.com/book/9781493069149

The “Wright Before the Lloyd” exhibit, which runs through 2024, was curated by Tim Samuelson, the City of Chicago Cultural Historian Emeritus. The exhibit draw on his vast knowledge and extensive collection of Wright and Louis Sullivan artifacts. Samuelson cut his teeth in preservation as a student in the 1960s, helping the late Richard Nickel salvage artifacts from Sullivan building that were being demolished in Chicago.

Samuelson, left, with Eric J. Nordstrom of the bldg.51 archive, at the exhibit opening.

The exhibit focuses on Wright’s early career, when he signed his work “Frank L. Wright.” He worked for Joseph Lyman Silsbee and Adler & (Louis) Sullivan before his dismissal from Adler & Sullivan. It also focuses on Cecil S. Corwin, Wright’s dear friend who he met soon after moving to Chicago form Madison.

The exhibit catalogue, written by Samuelson, with an Introduction by museum curator Allison Barr, is a summary of many of the text blocks from the exhibit and includes some of the exhibit’s photographs and drawings. It also includes photographs of some of  Wright’s pre-“Lloyd” work and some of Samuelson’s rich collection of artifacts that are on display. The chapter entitled “A Tale of Two Houses” is about Corwin’s H. G. Mitchell House in Racine and Wright’s F. R. Bagley House in Hinsdale, Illinois, both from 1894. The chapter raises the question of how much involvement Wright had in the design of the Mitchell House, with no definitive answer.

Museum curator Allison Barr helps set up the exhibit.

This slim book – it is just 23 pages – is a fine overview of the exhibit and Corwin and Wright’s relationship for people who cannot travel to Racine to see the exhibit for themselves. It ends with Wright’s tribute to Corwin in 1958, just a few months before Wright died, “…the best friend, perhaps I’ve ever had.”

To Order:https://www.racineheritagemuseum.org/product/wright-before-the-lloyd-exhibit-catalog/214?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false

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“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.

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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

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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.

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OA + D’s Encore

© Mark Hertzberg (2022). Chandler photographs courtesy of, and © Michael Rust

There are seemingly not enough hours in the day for some people, including Randolph C. Henning, Eric M. O’Malley, and William B. Scott, Jr. 

O’Malley, left, Henning, and Scott  June 28, 2019, at Taliesin for a meeting of the Taliesin Fellows.

They have “day jobs,” but because they are also three individuals who are passionate about, and collected material associated with, Frank Lloyd Wright, his students, and other organic practitioners, they founded Organic Architecture + Design (OA+D) in 2013. Their mission is to honor the past, celebrate the present and encourage the future of organic architecture and design through education, conservation of original design materials, publications and exhibitions.

O’Malley, Tim Samuelson, left, then the City of Chicago Cultural Historian, and David Jameson meet in Samuelson’s archives near OA+D’s, in June 2018 to plan an exhibit about Alfonse Iannelli at the Racine, Wisconsin, Heritage Museum.

Christopher Paulson, right, Executive Director of the Racine Heritage Museum looks at cartoons of windows Iannelli designed for Francis Barry Byrne’s St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Racine, which Samuelson was lending to the museum.

They felt that big institutions are selective about what is saved, often rejecting worthy collections. They perceived a rapid loss of material with historical value associated with the organic movement—especially regarding lesser known architects and designers. Drawing from their own personal collections, as well as others that they were aware of, they also felt that a journal promoting an awareness of Organic Architecture (past, present and future) could be of interest and sustained.

OA+D’s list of accomplishments since 2013 is impressive:

-They are in their ninth year of publishing the Journal of Organic Architecture + Design, a quality glossy journal produced three times a year, each issue guest edited by a scholar and devoted to a single topic supporting their mission.

-In 2016 they built and placed on long term loan to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation a replica of Wright’s model of the unrealized San Francisco Call newspaper building (1913) to replace the original model which left its longtime home in Hillside at Taliesin when Wright’s models were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. 

-They have published several books, including a monograph about the box projects of William Wesley Peters:

-They maintain archive space in Chicago, in Los Angeles, and in Lexington, Kentucky, and now also in Chandler, Arizona. A link to their noteworthy holdings is at:

https://www.oadarchives.com/collection-s-list

So, what could Organic Architecture + Design (OA + D) do for an encore? How about recently adding a fourth archive site (Chandler) after being selected by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in July to be the stewards of what remains of the vast archive of Taliesin Architects (TA), first known as Taliesin Associated Architects (TAA), formed after Wright’s death in 1959? After the Museum of Modern Art and Arizona State University took their share, the majority of the collection, which includes more than 50,000 drawings, is housed in OA+D’s new archive in Chandler, Arizona.

The grand opening was in December. (While one of OA+D’s missions is to make their holdings available to scholars and aficionados of Wright’s and related work, the TA archive is so extensive that it will take time to ingest it, and there is no definite date for public access.)

Scott says, “Probably the most exciting things they (the Foundation) gave us are these models.” Those models include a seven foot model of the 1963 proposal for the Belmont (N.Y.) Race Course, a proposal published in Architectural Forum, and a model built by the late David Dodge of a country club in Hawaii ( based on Wright’s design for a home for Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe). There is also a seven foot long rendition of the Court of the Seven Seas in San Francisco by Ling Po. He adds that Stuart Graff (President and CEO of the Foundation) “deserves a big thank you for this” as does the entire archive staff at Taliesin West.

Some might step back and rest their laurels on an accomplishment like the TA acquisition. But that is not OA+D’s nature. Inevitably they will surprise us again. In the meantime, follow their work in the Journal. An annual subscription is $50, money well spent. 

Links:

OA+D: https://www.oadarchives.com

Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation on the transfer of the TA archive to OA+D: 

https://franklloydwright.org/frank-lloyd-wright-foundation-partners-with-oad-archives-to-steward-taliesin-architects-archive/