LOST...

Being an ongoing series of postings on missing artifacts from Frank Lloyd Wright's Martin House complex [not the hapless passengers of Oceanic Flight 815].

This week:  buffet doors:

Below:  detail of Martin House buffet, Fuermann and Sons, 1907

During the Martin House "period of abandonment" (c. 1937 - 1954), roughly three quarters of the original compliment of art glass (394 pieces) was removed from the complex.  Much of it was spirited away by Darwin R. Martin in his attempt to liquidate components of the Jewett Parkway property.  Most of this art glass made its way to a few collectors and dealers and, from there, to public and private collections around the world.  The eighty-nine pieces of glass from the carriage house and conservatory were not as fortunate and may have been destroyed in the demolition of these buildings; most of them remain unaccounted for.  Only the Barton House was unscathed; it retains its original array of forty-five pieces of art glass.  

Among the pieces of Martin House 

diaspora that found a good institutional home were a pair of art glass doors from the dining room buffet.  They are held in the collection of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida, an outstanding collection of American decorative arts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a concentration on the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany.  The Museum has been graciously cooperative in sharing images and information on these rare doors, but is not able to deaccession them to make them available to the Martin House.  The mystery that remains is:  what became of the other identical pair of doors from the buffet?

  

The remaining two doors are conspicuously absent because, as interior panels, they were likely well-preserved over the decades and protected from the elements, increasing the possibility that they survived...somewhere.  Having examined the Morse Museum doors first-hand, I can attest that they are in excellent condition.  So, where are their counterparts?  Given that at least one piece of Martin House art glass (a conservatory door) is known to reside in a private collection in Japan, we may never locate the two remaining buffet doors.

  

The good news:  with one pair carefully preserved by the Morse Museum, the craftsmen at Oakbrook Esser Studios can produce perfect reproductions from the extant example.  Thus, a fully-restored buffet is in the offing - minus the Swedish meatballs.  

Dubai and the Mile High

by EJF, Doorman for the Ivory Tower

Following five years of construction and media buzz, the Burj Khalifa (formerly Burj Dubai) - now the world's tallest building - officially opened this week with a fireworks display befitting the mind-boggling structure. Although a thoroughly 21st century building in terms of its sheer size, structure, mechanical systems and amenities, the Burj has a mid-twentieth century precedent (at least on paper):  Frank Lloyd Wright's audacious plan for the Illinois ("Mile High") building, a skyscraper-to-end-all-skyscrapers envisioned for Chicago.  

While there are many differences between Wright's Mile High and Adrian Smith's Burj (for SOM), they share a fundamental approach to the super-tall building:  bundling masses together to produce a meta-form that strategically diminishes as it ascends - in effect, bundling individual towers together into a mega-tower.  Such a form is perhaps most familiar in the American consciousness in the Willis Tower (Sears Tower), with its stepped, blocky massing resembling a larger structure arrested in construction.  While this approach is, at the end of the day, a structural consideration to combat wind and torsion loads in these structures, both the Mile High and the Burj take inspiration from the natural world.  Wright's tower appears to be inspired by crystalline or splintered wood forms, while the Burj reflects an inspiration from the form of bundled reeds, an element of Middle Eastern vernacular architecture dating back to Ancient Egypt.  Moreover, the Burj, glittering techno-tower though it may be, has a plan based in nature; its spiraling "Y" plan,  with masses exfoliating out from the center along a matrix of circles fused with hexagons, was inspired by the Hymenocallis, a desert wildflower - a nod to Wright's organic architecture.  I can't help but think of Wright using a Prairie flower to demonstrate the core-and-cantilever structure of his Price Tower (Bartlesville, OK) - the only one of his various skyscraper designs ever built.

The Burj Khalifa has shattered the world record for tallest building, surging past the previous record-holder, Taipei 101, by over 300 meters.  Still, the Burj would be dwarfed by Wright's Mile High (literally a mile high or 5,280 feet), had it been built.  It may not be fair to compare the built and the unbuilt, but Wright's vision may not be a flight of fancy for long.  The Jeddah tower, proposed by Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, would hit Wright's mile-high mark if constructed.  And Eugene Tsui's Ultima Tower would be an incredible two mile high "sky city" contained within one structure.  For the moment, these concepts remain in the realm of utopian fantasy;  but, with the completion of the Burj Dubai, it may be only a matter of time (and money) before skyscrapers break the mile-high barrier. 

Click HERE for an amazing digital simulation of Wright's Illinois building, created by Harvard Graduate School of Design students - the closest you may ever come to taking that elevator ride to the 500th floor...

 

Happy Holidays

As the Weekly Wright-up staff heads off for its traditional year-end retreat (to study the effects of wassail on blogging), we'd like to wish you a new year where the world is more peaceful, where prosperity grows, where good health is a right and not a privilege, where education equals opportunity, and where art and culture are celebrated.

Happy Holidays and New Year from the Weekly Wright-up!  

We'll return the week of January 4, 2010.

A Rare Chair

By EJF, Honorary Chair

L and below:  Rohlfs dining chair from the collection of David Whitney 

The Martin family collection of furnishings includes a virtual who's-who of turn-of-the-twentieth-century designers.  Pieces by Stickley, Tiffany and Heintz Art Metal graced the Martin House c. 1907, and many of these remain in the collection today.  But one distinctive Arts and Crafts designer - Charles Rohlfs - is represented only at the periphery of this collection.


For years, an anecdote circulated that "the Martins" once owned a "Rohlfs dining chair or chairs" - an urban myth, perhaps, but a tantalizing one, given Rohlfs' legendary stature as one of most original designers associated with the Arts and Crafts scene of Western New York.  This tale remained unsubstantiated until 2006, when a Rohlfs chair with provenance pertaining to the Martin family came to light in Sotheby's sale of the collection of David Whitney.  

The Whitney chair can be traced confidently to "Mrs. D. R. Martin," though it is unclear which of the three wives of Darwin R. Martin was the owner.  The Sotheby's catalog entry attributes the chair originally to Mr. and Mrs. Darwin D. Martin "by repute." Although the chair was made in Buffalo in 1901 and would have been a plausible part of the elder Martins' decor, I consider the attribution unsubstantiated. There is no corroborating evidence that indicates that Darwin D. and Isabelle Martin had such chairs, either in their first home on Summit Avenue, or in the Wright-designed Martin House on Jewett Parkway.


Today, an apparently identical Rohlfs chair is included in the touring exhibition, "The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs" (American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation).  This example is from the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.  Additionally, other examples of the same chair are found in the LA County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Two Red Roses Foundation.  The question remains: were these five chairs once part of the same dining suite?   


Given Darwin and Isabelle Martin's well-known interest in Arts and Crafts furnishings, it's tempting to think that they may have had a set of four to six of these chairs around a dining table in their Summit Avenue home.  But until we can connect these "dots" more clearly, we only know that one of their daughters-in-law once had one of these throne-like chairs, but apparently abdicated her throne years ago.  

The Martin House in USA Today [click here]

Doug Benz for USA Today

Spectacular Structures

By EJF, Chicag-o-phile 

 L:  corner detail showing slender, stainless steel columns, Greatbatch Pavilion 

The accolades for the Eleanor and Wilson Greatbatch Pavilion just keep coming, and not just for the building's overall merits.  Earlier this year, the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois (SEAOI) gave the Pavilion its "Best Medium Structure" award via Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, LLP (SOM), the structural engineers who worked with Toshiko Mori Architects on the "garden pavilion" at the Martin House Complex.

This award should be of interest to more than just the "slide rule set;" it underscores SOM's role in making Mori's bold design vision for the Pavilion a reality.  SOM looms large in the history of modern architecture - from the Willis Tower (aka Sears Tower) to the 1962 Bunshaft addition to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, to the incredible Burj Dubai.  Moreover, this award from the Chicago-based SEAI provides a sense of historical symmetry to the Martin House / Greatbatch Pavilion project:  Chicago has long been the seat of innovation in modern architecture, from the birth of the skyscraper to the launch of the young Frank Lloyd Wright's career from the tower of Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium building.

R:  The Nichols Bridgeway 

But this award takes on even more gravitas if you consider the competition.  The runners-up in the medium projects category (recipients of "Awards of Merit") included the Nichols Bridgeway (Arup / Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc.), a graceful pedestrian bridge linking Millennium Park and Renzo Piano's new Modern wing for the Art Institute of Chicago.  Also in the running were structurally distinctive new buildings for Loyola University (Halvorson and Partners) and Northern Arizona University (OWP / P).  The breathtaking structural achievement of each of these projects attests to the cutting-edge company that Mori / SOM's Buffalo Pavilion keeps.    

Stranger Than Fiction

 

The scattered pieces of the Martin House - art glass, furniture, fixtures and family ephemera - sometimes seem like holy relics from a Saint (Saint Martin perhaps?).  Like such revered bones, pieces of the Martin House have been taken to the far corners of the earth, transported and traded in secret and, at times, tragically lost.  The recent rediscovery of two fingers and a tooth from persecuted Italian astronomer Galileo attests to the lengths that people will go to preserve seemingly insignificant bits of history (or figures from history) and elevate them to sacred status by association.  It also attests to the grim absurdity of how such bits are squirreled away, only to resurface years later.  

The various vignettes concerning Martin House art glass in particular are stranger than fiction.  There's the case of the two pier cluster laylights that Darwin R. Martin once traded to a business associate for an anodized aluminum ashtray that caught his eye;  one of these exquisite panels sold via Sotheby's this year for over $200,000.  Then there's the pier cluster casement window that was rescued from sooty oblivion (behind a furnace) in an Elmwood Avenue basement by a UB student with a good eye.  That one's alive and well and retired to Ohio.

But perhaps the most bizarre and harrowing tale of lost art glass surfaced recently in response to the Buffalo News article about our new art glass book:  a reader called to say that, circa 1962, when the pergola, conservatory and carriage house were being demolished, an associate of his was witness to the demolition contractors using pieces of fallen art glass windows - broken glass and caming - as traction for their equipment on the muddy site.  I guess this would be a case of art-glass-as-kitty-litter.  I'm hard pressed to think of a more ignoble fate for these masterworks of Wright's design;  it's akin to using a Vermeer to patch a hole in the roof.

So please, when you need a little help getting your car out of the driveway this winter, don't put your Martin House window under the rear tires - give us a call instead.  We can think of a better use for it.