Think about what it says about Buffalo at the turn of the twentieth century to have one of the most modern office buildings in the United States and six homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the man who was on his way to becoming America’s greatest architect.

Buffalo New York was a thriving industrial hub, a center for shipping and manufacture, one of America’s first-ranked cities. It’s not surprising that it drew the country’s best.

Of all Frank Lloyd Wright architecture one of his greatest achievements was the Larkin Company Administration Building, no longer stands but its spirit lingers in the building’s "footprint" on Seneca Street where it once stood.

A Larkin executive, Darwin D. Martin, went to visit his brother in Oak Park, Illinois, and was introduced to Wright’s style and to the architect himself. Impressed, Martin convinced the Larkin board of directors to commission Wright to design the company’s new office building.

Martin later asked Wright to design what became known as the Darwin D. Martin house at 125 Jewett Parkway, now in the later stages of a multi-year restoration project and open for tours. One of the largest of Wright’s "Prairie-style" houses, it has graceful sweeping lines and a spacious interior. Many architectural critics have called it one of Wright’s greatest works.

The nearby George Barton house, 118 Summit Avenue, built for Martin’s sister, Delta, and her husband, was the first of Wright’s Buffalo buildings to be completed. Small, yet filled with light, many prefer its simplicity to the expanse of the Darwin Martin house.

Another jewel is the adjoining Gardner’s Cottage, 285 Woodward Avenue, recently acquired to once again become part of the Martin complex. The warm exterior and the exquisitely-preserved arts and crafts interior lit by abundant leaded glass windows are a pleasure to behold.

The Walter V. Davidson house, 57 Tillinghast Place, designed for another Larkin executive, is secluded on a residential street amid trees and foliage. But even without a guidebook, a visitor knows this is another splendid Wright creation. The entry is low, typical of many Wright designs, then one enters a two-story living room with cathedral ceiling and a wall of diamond-shaped leaded glass windows rising from low cabinets to the ceiling. The effect is spectacular.

The William R. Heath house, 76 Soldiers Place, is distinctive for its accommodation to a small lot size. Built for the brother-in-law of company president John Larkin, Wright placed the house adjacent to the Bird Street sidewalk, then elevated the floor and window levels to restrict the view from the street to the inside.

Wright’s final Buffalo-area house, Graycliff, was built in 1927 as a summer home for Isabelle and Darwin Martin on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie at Derby, south of Buffalo. Mrs. Martin, who had failing eyesight, wanted a house with more light than that entering their Buffalo home. Windows are taller and more open, allowing the summer breezes off the lake to flow through the comfortable home. Under restoration by a grassroots preservation group, the attractive house is open for tours.

Recently built is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Blue Sky Mausoleum, overlooking two small lakes in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery. Darwin Martin commissioned the architect to design a monument for a family plot and Wright obliged by conceptualizing a flight of 12 shallow steps with crypts on either side leading to a tall monument. Martin nicknamed it the Blue Sky Mausoleum because of its projected cost. The design was completed shortly before the 1929 Stock Market Crash which ushered in the Great Depression. Martin lost his fortune and the plans were put aside until 2004, when the mausoleum was finally built. None of the Martin family is buried there, however. Instead, crypts are available to anyone in the world. Another recent addition to Buffalo’s Frank Lloyd Wright inventory is the Fontana Boathouse. Originally designed for the University of Wisconsin in 1905, the Boathouse remained unbuilt until 2007 when it emerged from the ground alongside Buffalo’s Black Rock Channel as a new home for the West Side Rowing Club.

Wright’s Career

Before Frank Lloyd Wright was born, his mother decided he was going to be a great architect so she placed pictures of buildings in his nursery and bedroom during his younger years to inspire him. Considered to be America’s greatest architect, Wright was born June 8, 1867, in Richland Center, Wisconsin.

To help support the family while in his teens, Wright worked for a dean of the University of Wisconsin’s department of engineering and spent two semesters studying civil engineering at the University.

In 1887, Wright moved to Chicago and took his first architectural job with Joseph Silsbee, who would later design a number of projects in Buffalo. He then moved to the firm of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan a year later as a draftsman.

Wright worked under Sullivan’s direction for six years, later acknowledging him to be his greatest influence and referring to Sullivan as his "Lieber Meister," or beloved master. Sullivan rejected classical architectural themes and European traditions and became known for what one writer has described as "integrated ornamentation based on natural themes." He developed the maxim "Form Follows Function" which Wright later revised to "Form and Function Are One."

In 1889, at age 22, Wright married Catherine Lee Tobin,18, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Together with Sullivan and his other contacts she gave him social polish and the cultural background he lacked. The couple had six children./p>

Wright and Sullivan parted company in 1893 when Sullivan discovered that Wright had been accepting commissions for house designs on his own, a violation of an earlier agreement between the two. The moonlighting work was important, however, because it foreshadowed Wright’s low, sheltering roof lines, the prominence of the central fireplace and open floor plans.

He opened his own practice in his home and studio complex in the nearby suburb of Oak Park, where he conceived the Prairie style of architecture. It was said that he seemed to possess a skill of site memorization, visiting a location sometimes only once before creating a building that blended with and complemented the grounds. Wright designed more than 150 structures over the next decade, planning their interior furnishings as well. He passed on his principles to the architects who worked with him, and many of them went on to significant architectural careers of their own.

Wright created what he called "organic architecture" that reflected the needs of the client, the nature of the site and the native materials that were available. "There were no off-the-shelf products, no standardized procedures, for his unconventional buildings," biographer Ada Louise Huxtable wrote. "Whatever it took in time and money for the right solution or proper finish was justified in his mind."

His emphasis on simplicity and his insistence that natural materials be used naturally became a hallmark of his work. Some of Wright’s most notable designs during this period were for "Prairie Houses" that complemented the long, low horizontal prairie on which they were found. They had low pitched roofs, deep overhangs, no attics or basements, and generally long rows of casement windows that further emphasized the horizontal theme. To bring out its natural beauty, woodwork was stained, never painted.

The Buffalo years began in 1903 when Wright designed the Larkin Soap Company Administration Building on Seneca Street. He designed the Prairie-style Darwin Martin house for a Larkin Company executive who became a principal benefactor for the next 37 years. The adjacent George Barton house was designed for Martin’s sister and her husband, and Wright also drew the plans for the nearby Gardner’s Cottage. He designed a house for William R. Heath, a lawyer and Larkin company executive who was company president John Larkin’s brother-in law. The Walter V. Davidson house was designed for another Larkin executive. Wright also designed Graycliff in 1926, the Isabelle and Darwin Martin summer house at Lake Erie in Derby, south of Buffalo.

Frank Lloyd Wright Architecture Wright was associated with the Oak Park Unitarian Universalist congregation when they asked him to design a new church after their wooden church burned during a storm. His Unity Temple in Oak Park is one of the earliest public buildings constructed of concrete, poured in place into wooden molds. Wright said he chose concrete because it was, in his words, "cheap," and yet could be made as dignified as more traditional masonry. His desire to create a house of worship expressing the powerful simplicity of ancient temples prompted his suggestion to call it a "temple" rather than a church.

Wright’s genius as an architect was matched by the turmoil of his personal life. In 1909 Wright left his family for Europe with Mamah Cheney, the wife of one of his clients. While he was in Germany, two portfolios of his work were published there that brought him international recognition and greatly influenced other architects.

In 1911 he began building a new home and studio near Spring Green, Wisconsin. The complex, called Taliesin, was located on ancestral farmland. Following Mamah Cheney’s divorce, he announced she would live there with him. Tragedy struck in 1914, however, when Taliesin was set afire by a crazed servant who, newspapers reported, was underpaid and driven mad by the unconventional lovers. He killed Mamah, her two children and four of Wright’s leading workmen.

Although stunned by the event, Wright immediately began rebuilding Taliesin, finishing in about a year. Following the completion of "Taliesin II," he met sculptress Miriam Noel who joined him there, beginning a turbulent seven-year relationship.

He opened an office in Tokyo where he spent approximately six years (1916-22) working on Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel. It featured a "floating foundation" and combined oriental simplicity with modern-world comfort. The structure was initially criticized for its aesthetic design, but when it survived a 1923 earthquake that left most of Tokyo in rubble, the criticism turned to praise.

Returning to the United States in 1922, Wright opened an office in Los Angeles and turned to the use of concrete, a new material in residential homes. Most of these "textile block" houses, carrying a Mayan and Japanese influence, were built in California.

In 1922, Wright was formally divorced from Catherine. He married Miriam Noel the following year, but she left Wright in 1924, less than one year after their marriage. Soon after, quite by chance, at a performance of the Petrograd Ballet, he met Olga (Olgivanna) Lazovich Hinzenburg, the daughter of Montenegro’s chief justice.

In February 1925, Olgivanna and her 8-year-old daughter moved into Taliesin, but another disaster followed two months later. A fire started by defective telephone wiring caused nearly $500,000 damage. Undaunted, Wright began construction of Taliesin III. In 1927, a third fire at Taliesin caused the loss of significant pieces of Asian artwork and damaged the studio. Part of Wright’s remaining Japanese art collection was auctioned to pay debts and, bankrolled by friends, "Wright, Incorporated" took legal ownership of Taliesin. Following his divorce from Miriam, Wright married Olgivanna in 1928, his third and final marriage.

Wright’s last style, "Usonian," (the phrase stood for the United States of North America) adapted architecture to the simple and economically tight lives of families of the Depression-era1930s. Usonian homes were moderate cost, single story houses that featured innovations such as radiant heating through hot water pipes in the cement slab floor, prefabricated walls of boards and tar paper, an open plan with greater flow of space, and a new invention, the carport. In 1954 Wright wrote The Natural House that discussed the Usonian home and introduced a new concept, the "Usonian Automatic," a hollowstone block house that could be owner-built.

During the Great Depression, with almost no architectural commissions coming his way, Wright and his wife founded an architectural apprenticeship program known as the "Taliesin Fellowship," established, they said, to provide a total learning environment, integrating all aspects of the apprentices’ lives in order to produce responsible, creative and cultured human beings. Wright taught the principles and philosophies of architecture, and the Fellowship opened with thirty apprentices who were to gain experience not only in architecture but also in construction, farming, gardening and cooking, and the study of nature, music, art and dance.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater He published An Autobiography and The Disappearing City in 1932 at the age of 65. Both influenced several generations of young architects. It was also at this time that Wright did some of the most significant work of his later career. He designed Fallingwater in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, in 1935 and the S.C. Johnson & Son Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin, the following year. He began design of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 1943, but would not live to see its completion two months after his death in 1959.

Wright decided in 1937 that he wanted a more permanent winter residence in Arizona. He acquired several hundred acres of raw, rugged desert in the foothills at Scottsdale, Arizona, where the Fellowship had moved every winter from Wisconsin, and began the construction of Taliesin West as a "Desert Camp." For more than 20 years it would serve as Wright’s architectural laboratory for testing design innovations, structural ideas and building details. Of the more than 1,100 projects Wright designed during his lifetime, nearly one-third were created during the last decade of his life.

Wright died in 1959 at age 91 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Fellowship and its activities continued under Olgivanna’s leadership until her death in 1985 and then evolved into the present-day Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, dedicated to conserving Wright’s work and advancing his principles of organic architecture.

REFERENCES:
"Brief Biography of Frank Lloyd Wright," and "Frank Lloyd Wright" City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development, Landmarks Division.
Books about Wright include Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Knopf, 1992); Ada Louise Huxtable, Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Penguin Books, 2004); and Wright’s Autobiography (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943).
For pictures of Wright’s creations, see "Frank Lloyd Wright" in "A Digital Archive of American Architecture," and Henry Russell Hitchcock, In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright 1887-1941 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1982; first edition published 1942 by Hawthorn Books).

The Larkin Company Administration Building

One of Buffalo’s architectural treasures, the Larkin Soap Company Administration Building, was lost to the wrecker’s ball more than a half century ago, "an act of destruction," one of Wright’s biographers has written, "subsequently recognized as cultural vandalism." Wright, in his Autobiography called the Larkin Building "the first emphatic protestant in architecture against the tide of meaningless elaboration sweeping the United States." He said the brick and stone structure was "a genuine expression of power directly applied to purpose" that represented "affirmation of the new Order of this Machine Age."

There is no question that the building was one of the finest Wright ever designed. Completed in 1904 at a cost of $4 million, it was constructed of dark red brick, utilizing pink tinted mortar, and it was notable for its block-like vertical structure and large central atrium rising the full height of the building. Side gallery offices were illuminated by the central court and windows between the brick piers. The upper level contained a kitchen, bakery, dining rooms, classrooms, a branch of the Buffalo Public Library and a conservatory.

A roof garden, paved with brick, served as a recreation area for employees, families and guests. The entrances of the building were flanked by two waterfall-like fountains. Above them were bas-reliefs by Richard Bock, a sculptor who worked on other Wright creations. He also designed the globes on the tops of the building’s central exterior piers.

The interior walls were made of cream-colored brick. Wright experimented with magnesite, a mineral used in making bricks and for lining the interiors of chimneys, to make fireproof stairs, doors, window sills, coping, capitals, partitions, desk tops and plumbing slabs. Floors, later said to have been of marble, were actually made from a base of concrete, cushioned with a mixture of wood fiber and magnesite, then covered with sheets of magnesite.

Natural and artificial light was provided by a Wright-designed innovation, hermetically sealed double-paned windows. There were Wright-designed electrical fixtures that enabled the employees to work in comfort at their Wright-designed metal office furniture while breathing air from a Wright-designed "air conditioning" system, another first for a major office building.

One of his innovations was a wall-hung water closet. He said of his creation years later, "It is interesting that I, an architect supposed to be concerned with the aesthetic sense of the building, should have invented the hung wall for the w.c. (easier to clean under), and adopted many other innovations like the glass door, steel furniture, air-conditioning and radiant or ’gravity heat.’ Nearly every technological innovation used today was suggested in the Larkin Building in 1904."

In his Autobiography Wright wrote, "The dignified top-lighted interior created the effect of one great official family at work in day-lit, clean and airy quarters." The building was designed for a work force of 1,800 secretaries, clerks and executives of the flourishing mail-order company. It had to be clean and comfortable to attract women employees to an industrial section of the city.

Larkin building interior A noted architectural critic described the central court as having "really monumental scale and even grandeur, not unlike the finest interior courts of certain commercial buildings" of the previous century, although "this grandeur is in no way unsuited to the purposes of the building."

A Wright biographer wrote of the Larkin building, "It was a spectacular concept, handsomely executed, an extraordinary structure," that received international acclaim and was written about in contemporary architectural journals. Wright described his Larkin building as "noble," and added, in response to a critic, "It may lack playful light and shade, but it has strength and dignity and power. It may not be ’Architecture,’ but it has integrity."

Retailing trends resulting in declining sales forced changes in the Larkin operation. In 1939, it was decided to move the Larkin Retail Store from across the street into the administration building where there was more floor space. An extensive renovation was completed that altered the Wright-inspired character of the building, and while company executives said the new store would be one of the most attractive retail establishments in this part of the country, the building’s eventual demise became inevitable.

In 1943, after selling off other Larkin buildings, the administration building was sold to a Pennsylvania contractor who had no plans for it. When the Larkin store lease ran out, the new owner abandoned the building and it was taken over by the city in a 1945 tax foreclosure. Despite a national advertising campaign to try to sell the building, no buyer could be found for the city’s asking price.

While various state and local governmental agencies floated ideas for the building’s use, many of them impractical, its value declined and its deterioration accelerated. In 1941 the globes atop the central exterior piers had been removed amid concerns about structural problems associated with their weight. Now, vandals had begun stripping anything of value. As Larkin historian Jerome Puma wrote, "By October 1947, the building was virtually useless. Every double-paned window was broken, the iron gate had fallen off its rusted hinges, and the iron fence surrounding the building was sacrificed for a wartime scrap collection."

Several proposals to buy the structure were rebuffed as being too far below value. Finally, a local buyer with the intention of tearing down the building took the property off the city’s hands and demolition began in 1950. It took more than four months to take down the building, however, because the floors were built of reinforced concrete and supported by steel beams. It was said that Wright took perverse pleasure in the fact that he had built the Larkin Building so well that it was hard to tear down.10

Thus, an important piece of Buffalo architectural history was lost in less than a half century, a victim of economic times and changing attitudes that favored "new" over what had been, not too long before, revolutionary in concept.

REFERENCES:
¹Ada Louise Huxtable, Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 101.
²Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943), pp. 150-151.
³The description is from Jerome Puma, "The Larkin Building," (1978) which has a lengthier account and pictures of the history of the building from its early days through its demolition; and Iain Thomson, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Visual Encyclopedia (San Diego: Thunder Bay Press, 1999), p. 204.
⁴Edgar Kaufmann, ed. An American Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1988; originally published 1955), pp.137-138.
⁵Wright, Autobiography, p. 151. ⁶Buffalo Architectural Guidebook Corporation, Buffalo Architecture: A Guide (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), p. 271.
⁷Henry Russell Hitchcock, In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright 1887-1941 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1982; first edition published 1942 by Hawthorn Books), p.51. Illustrations of the Larkin building and its interior appear on pp. 172-175.
⁸Huxtable, p. 100.
⁹The quotation comes from a PBS documentary. The PBS site carries additional pictures and details about the Larkin Building.
¹⁰Huxtable, p. 134.

The Darwin Martin House Complex

A FEW MINUTES WITH TOSHIKO MORI video

By the turn of the twentieth century, Darwin D. Martin was the second-wealthiest man in Buffalo. He had long been a top-notch salesman for the Larkin Soap Company and had devised an efficient card filing system that simplified billings. He moved up in the Larkin Company administrative hierarchy over the years, becoming one of the highest-paid business executives in the country. Now, he was determined to build a home that befitted his stature in the community.

Martin had met Frank Lloyd Wright while on a visit to his brother in Illinois. Impressed with the architect, he had convinced the Larkin board of directors to commission Wright to design the Larkin Company Administration Building. Martin then asked Wright to design a house for him and his wife, Isabelle.

The structure became part of what is known as the Darwin Martin House Complex, the first opportunity for Wright to design, not just one house, but a series of interrelated buildings that fit one with the other. In addition to the main house, the adjacent George Barton House and the Gardener’s Cottage remain today and are undergoing restoration.

The covered pergola, or walkway, that leads from the main house to the gardens has been reconstructed along with a conservatory and a carriage house that served as a chauffer’s residence. Each structure is now part of the regular year-round tours of the Martin House Complex. A newly-designed visitor’s center by architect Toshiko Mori that incorporates some of Wright’s themes will also become part of the complex.

The Darwin Martin House

The Darwin Martin House
The residence that was designed for Darwin and Isabelle Martin, at 125 Jewett Parkway, is considered by many architectural critics to be one of the finest examples of Wright’s "Prairie-style" homes. With its graceful horizontal lines blending into the landscape, it looks as though it could have been designed in 1954, not 1904.

The Darwin Martin House Interior It is said that Wright had a virtually unlimited budget in designing the Martin house. During its construction, fifty men were paid $2 a day and worked ten hours, six days a week for two years. The brick and wood house is enormous - 15,000 square feet-with an open plan that results in a free flow of space between rooms, and from inside to outside. Almost every room looked out onto the gardens and trees on the property.

The main house contains eight bedrooms, a spacious living room that connects to the dining room and to an outside veranda. The inside is notable for its large central fireplaces. The reception room fireplace, for instance, has a tapered arch with a sunburst effect, amplified by gold in the mortar. Rich wood accents remain, as do beautiful stained glass windows, including the famed "Tree of Life" design. It also showcased a statue of Nike, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a remarkable replica of which has been recently installed.

Frank Lloyd Wright Stained Glass Wright paid attention to every detail in the house, even down to designing finely crafted furniture such as his "barrel chair," which he would use again decades later in other homes. Martin was an avid collector of books, so Wright designed shelves that took advantage of load-bearing pier clusters and also covered the heating radiators. He created a home office with access off the porte cochere so that Larkin employees could meet with Martin without disturbing the privacy of the main house.

The architect at times chided or overruled his clients when they objected to, or expressed puzzlement about, some aspect of the design. But when it was done, Wright considered the Martin House "a well-nigh perfect composition." For many years after, he kept its site plan pinned to his drafting table for inspiration.

The George Barton House
The story behind the Barton house, 188 Summit Avenue, begins many years before its inception. Darwin Martin and his brother, William, left home at an early age and began selling soap door to door for the Larkin Company. Both became successful businessmen, but Darwin Martin’s unhappy childhood left him with a desire to build a complex of houses where his family might live together.

The George Barton House In 1902, Martin commissioned Wright to design a house for his brother-in-law, George Barton, and his sister, Delta. A floor plan based on an earlier prairie house design from Chicago was selected, and it became the first house to be built in the complex. Smaller than the main house, many consider it to be more charming and livable.

Like the Martin house, it was built on a cruciform floor plan, an architectural style found in Gothic churches, where the building is in the shape of a cross. In the case of the Barton House, the entry way is to the south, the dining room to west, the kitchen to the north, and the living room to the east.

The design gives the feeling of openness, despite the small room sizes. The reception, living and dining room spaces, though still identifiable as individual units, open one into the other. The two bedrooms on the second floor are at the opposite ends of a narrow corridor. Once again, Wright used the technique of going from a low, narrow space, into a wide, brilliantly lit one. Windows are wrapped around the house to create a feeling of spaciousness. The use of brick, concrete and oak makes the house an excellent example of Wright’s use of "organic architecture" in design.

The Gardener’s Cottage
The Martins employed a full-time gardener who was tasked with providing fresh flowers daily from the greenhouse for every room in the main house. Martin had Wright design a house for the gardener in 1908. A charming house that was under private ownership for many years, it has recently been acquired by the Martin House Restoration Corporation.

Wright’s Gardener’s cottage The house, at 285 Woodward Avenue, made of plaster on wood frame with its signature low roof lines and banks of leaded glass windows, is a sun-splashed gem of interior arts and crafts design, an inviting mix of wood, glass and light that is a pleasure to behold. It, too, will soon be open for tours.

The 100-foot long pergola connected the Martin House to a sun-lit interior garden in the conservatory. Landscape was an integral part of the plans for the complex. The Martin House veranda overlooked what Wright called a "floricycle," a semi-circular garden that was set away from the house, with of a variety of plants for year-round bloom. There were formal gardens, cutting gardens, a reflecting pool and a bed for peonies, Mrs. Martin’s favorite flower. The grounds also included clothesline poles designed by the architect, as well as concrete birdhouses.

Also part of the complex was a carriage house-stable, later used as a garage, with a chauffeur’s quarters above. It also housed the heating system and a generator for electricity. Heat was generated by boilers and then carried by pipes that ran below the pergola to radiators in the house.

Decline and Restoration
A strong friendship developed between Martin and Wright over the years of their association. Martin became the architect’’s prime benefactor, at times bailing him out financially, and he was directly or indirectly responsible for at least 15 of Wright’s buildings and projects.

Darwin Martin’s health began to fail in the late 1920s and when he died in 1935, the house was too much for Mrs. Martin to keep up. She abandoned it in 1938 and moved to an apartment house on West Ferry Street owned by her son. Vandalism and the elements took their toll during the 17 years the property remained vacant. There was talk of demolishing the complex in the 1940s, but somehow it managed to survive until 1955 when it was purchased by an architect, Sebastian Tauriello, who saved the house.

There had been so much damage over the years that, in order to maintain the house, Tauriello sold off the part of the land with the carriage house and greenhouse. They were demolished and replaced by three apartment buildings. These were recently purchased by the restoration corporation, then demolished.

The Barton house was restored in the 1970s by Eric Larrabee and his architect wife, Eleanor. During the 1960s and 1970s ownership of the Martin house went to the State University of New York, first used as the president’s residence then for special University functions. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and was named a National Historic Landmark in 1986.

In 1989, then-U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Dem-N.Y) proclaimed the Martin House a national treasure and championed its restoration. Renovation of the home began in the 1990s with the formation of the Martin House Restoration Corporation and the start of acquisition of properties once part of the Martin complex. Target date for restoration of the complex is 2007, a hundred years after the last workman left the Martin house building site.

The Greatbatch Pavilion at the Martin House
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House Complex has truly come into its own as a tourist destination with the opening of architect Toshiko Mori’s brilliant Greatbatch Pavilion. This 8,000 square foot interpretive center provides visitors to Wright’s Prairie Style masterpiece with museum quality exhibits, interactive touch screens, and a state-of-the-art orientation film that artfully and eloquently tell the story of Buffalo businessman Darwin D. Martin and the young man from Chicago who would go on to become the greatest architect of the 20th Century.

But as impressive as the interpretive elements are, it is the unobstructed panorama of the massive Martin House Complex framed in a series of uninterrupted glass panels that holds visitors’ awestruck attention. Toshiko Mori has succeeded in creating a sophisticated counterpoint to Wright’s masterpiece that is both deferential as well as dazzling in its own right. This wedding of innovative architecture separated by more than 100 years offers visitors an unparalleled architectural experience, one with few peers anywhere in the world.

While the final phase of the ongoing restoration of the Martin House interior remains to be completed, there is no need to wait to experience this true American treasure. For information on tours, click here.

Visit the Darwin Martin complex Web site. Click here for a multimedia presentation and related articles from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

We invite you to read The Weekly Wright-up, a blog of insights, observations and “Wright thinking” from the Curator’s corner of the Martin House Restoration Corporation

Numerous pictures of the Martin house are online. See Chuck LaChiusa, “Buffalo as an Architectural Museum: Darwin D. Martin House.”

Graycliff: Isabelle and Darwin Martin’s Summer Home

It was said that Isabelle Martin, the wife of Larkin Soap Company executive Darwin D. Martin, never really liked the house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for them in Buffalo. Its broad cantilevered eaves made the house too dark for her and, with her eyesight failing, she longed for a home with light.

She asked Wright to design them a house of sunlight that would also admit fresh breezes like those they found when they summered in the Adirondacks in years past. The result was Graycliff, a mid-career example of Wright’s concept of "organic architecture" where barriers are broken between buildings and the outside.

Graycliff Interior Architecture The Graycliff Estate, at 6472 Old Lake Shore Road in Derby, is set on a cliff 65 feet above Lake Erie with sweeping views of Lake Erie and Canada. Graycliff is comprised of three buildings set within eight scenic acres of gardens and grounds, all designed by Wright. The largest building, the two-story, 6,500 square-foot Isabelle R. Martin House served as the Martin summer home from 1927 to the mid-1940’s. The long, low, horizontal lines of the house complement the lake and the cliff strata. It not only captures the warm summer light and the cool lake breezes, but even in the depths of winter is light, inviting and welcoming.

Built between 1926-31, Graycliff is one of Wright’s most significant designs of the 1920s, and shares several innovative architectural elements with Wright’s most famous dwelling, Fallingwater in Pennsylvania (designed a decade later.)

All three Graycliff buildings are constructed of local limestone and feature bold sand-stucco planes with red stained cedar shingle roofs. The most prominent and dramatic design feature of the Isabelle R. Martin House is its transparency—with dramatic site lines through the house itself to the lake beyond. In this, Wright anticipated Philip Johnson’s design of the Glass House in Connecticut by twenty years. Glass doors in the first floor admit the lake breezes, giving the entire house a fresh, open quality. The Isabelle R. Martin House also features a broadly cantilevered, floating second floor, and a majestic balcony to the north that overlooks the sweeping lawns and shore. In line with Wright’s belief that the hearth was the heart of a home, a huge, off-center stone fireplace dominates the living room and is a presence in the dining room, too. Unlike the Buffalo house, with its crafted symmetries and lavish furnishings and windows, Graycliff is light and airy, and in many ways more inviting.

Foster House at Graycliff Estate Graycliff is testimony to Wright’s relationship with the Martin family. Darwin D. Martin, who had been a financial patron for years, was instrumental in the architect regaining possession of his Taliesin home and studios in Wisconsin after that property fell into the hands of creditors. Thus, it is not surprising that Wright made eight or nine visits to the building site as Graycliff was being constructed.

The architect returned in early 1936, after Darwin Martin’s death the previous winter. Presumably, Wright had come to pay his respects to Isabelle Martin, but the house had not yet been opened for the season. Western New York historian John Conlin drew upon the written recollections of Edgar Tafel, one of Wright’s apprentices:

The caretaker let us in. All the furniture was covered with sheets for protection. Mr. Wright led us in, surveyed the main floor, and directed us to take off the covers. He began to rearrange the furniture - beginning, as was his way, with the piano. Next he instructed us to get knives from the kitchen and to cut huge bunches of spring flowers and branches outside in the garden. We filled all the living room vases and pots. Mr. Wright left a note for the Martins, something like this: "Stopped by to visit you, FLW, your architect."¹

To rescue the property, the Graycliff Conservancy, a non-profit organization was established to acquire, restore, and preserve Graycliff. The Conservancy has obtained governmental funds, foundation grants and support from individual contributors to bring Graycliff back to life, authentically restored as Wright designed. Graycliff is now a New York State Landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Tours of Graycliff are sponsored by the Conservancy. Visit their Web site for tour information, as well as more on the history and architecture of this wonderful place.

Directions from Buffalo: Take the Skyway to Route 5 West. Continue on Route 5 West for approximately 15-20 minutes. Turn right onto Old Lake Shore Rd (at traffic light just past Wanakah.). Continue on Old Lake Shore Rd until you see the brown Graycliff sign on your right. Click here for directions from the New York State Thruway and a printable map.

SOURCES:
¹John Conlin, "Graycliff," from Buffalo Spree magazine, September 1997.
See also the Graycliff Web site.
For pictures, visit the Graycliff Web site or click here.

Wright’s Davidson and Heath Houses

With all the attention that is justifiably paid to Frank Lloyd Wright’s magnificent Darwin Martin Complex, two of his other architectural gems in Buffalo are often overlooked. Houses for William R. Heath (1905) and Walter Davidson (1908) resulted from the admiration these Larkin Company executives had for the Martin House. Each, in its own way, is unique and merits examination. Both are Prairie Style homes, with many of the features of the Martin house, though on a more modest scale.

The Davidson House

Wright’s Davidson House The Walter V. Davidson house, 57 Tillinghast Place, is secluded on a residential street amid trees and foliage. But even without a guidebook, a visitor knows this is another splendid Wright creation, though it reflects a relatively modest budget. Wright seems to have traded the richness that characterizes the Martin house for space and light.

The two story stucco house carries many prairie-style features, including a broad, flat chimney over a low-pitched, hipped roof, and wide soffits under projecting eaves that shelter clear leaded glass windows. The secluded main entrance at the front of the house was typical Wright, as was the low entry way.

From there, one enters a two-story living room with cathedral ceiling and a wall of diamond-shaped leaded glass windows rising from low cabinets to the ceiling. This is one of Wright’s "Tall Living Room" homes where the art glass windows are 1 1/2 stories high. The effect is spectacular.

The living room was directed to the side of the house, giving a view of the surrounding woods, although when a home was built on the lot next door quite close to the lot line, the view was lost.

To the west of the living room, the house divides into two stories that are in turn divided into multiple floor levels. According to Buffalo Architecture: A Guide, "Spatial grandeur is cleverly played off against intimacy, while even the smallest of spaces is opened up through Wright’s use of banded window sequences."

The Heath House

The William R. Heath house, 76 Soldiers Place, was built for the brother-in-law of company president John Larkin. The house, set on a long, narrow lot at Soldier’s Circle, is distinctive in the way the house was designed to compensate for the small lot size.

Wright placed the house adjacent to the Bird Street sidewalk, then elevated the floor and window levels to restrict the view from the street to the inside. The narrow entrance and stained-glass windows became effective screening devices, although the elegant window patterns still draw attention.

1911 Heath House photo by Ernst Wasmuth

Some of the house’s prairie features include massive square porch supports, a low-pitched hipped-roof on the porch, and second story buttress piers. Unlike other prairie houses, the plan extends in a single axis because of the lot constraints. The home is built from red brick that may have come from the same batch used for the Larkin building.

The front porch, living room and upper band of art glass windows face the circle and provide the view over a private lawn. The Heath house is considered a precursor to Wright’s renowned Robie house built in Chicago in 1909.

SOURCES:
"William R. Heath House," and Chuck LaChiusa, "William R. Heath House," at the "Buffalo as an Architectural Museum" Web site.
"Walter V. Davidson House" and Chuck LaChiusa, "Walter V. Davidson House," at the "Buffalo as an Architectural Museum" Web site.
Also see Reyner Banham et al., Buffalo Architecture: A Guide, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 163-4 (Heath House), and pp. 206-07 (Davidson House).

Blue-Sky Mausoleum

Drive eastward along West Delavan Avenue, just a block and a half past Delaware Avenue, and you’ll see it on your left, through the wrought iron fence surrounding picturesque Forest Lawn Cemetery. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Blue Sky Mausoleum gracefully blends into the landscape, a perfect illustration of the famed designer’s concept of "organic architecture."

Better yet, drive into the cemetery and walk to the mausoleum. It’s a serene setting with the blue sky and fleecy clouds the "ceiling" and the trees and greenery the "walls," as Wright intended.

The design consists of a flight of gently rising steps that provide 24 burial crypts, as well as space for memorial inscriptions. At the top of the steps, a white granite monolith overlooks two peaceful ponds.

Wright designed the mausoleum at the request of Darwin D. Martin, secretary of the Larkin Soap Company and longtime friend and benefactor. It was the last of four projects Martin personally commissioned from Wright. The two discussed the project between 1925 and 1928, and when its plans were finally presented, Martin nicknamed it the Blue Sky Mausoleum because of its projected cost. The design was completed shortly before the 1929 Stock Market Crash which ushered in the Great Depression. Martin lost his fortune and the plans were put aside.

The project languished until the 1990s when Fred Whaley Jr., president of the Forest Lawn Cemetery, attended some of the planning meetings for the Darwin Martin House restoration project. When he discovered that a Wright memorial had been designed for his cemetery, Whaley began the effort to raise public support and funds to develop the monument.

Architect Anthony Puttnam, who apprenticed under Wright at the beginning of his career, was named the principal architect on the project. $500,000 was raised and the project was underway.

Wright wrote a note to Martin explaining his design. "This is a burial facing the open sky--a dignified great headstone commune to all." He saw in it ". a nice symbolism in the stepping terraces. a compromise between the grave and the mausoleum," adding, "It may have the better points of both." Wright concluded, "The whole could not fail of noble affect."

Frank Lloyd Wright Design Blue Sky Mausoleum was opened in October 2004. None of the Martin family is buried there, however. Instead, crypts are available to anyone in the world. The design has been forever retired, making this beautiful structure at Forest Lawn unique in the world, a fitting legacy of both architect and patron.

SOURCES

¹"Frank Lloyd Wright’s Blue Sky Mausoleum Opens a Half-Century After It is Commissioned," Architectural Record, November 22, 2004 . Also see: Ramona Pando Whitaker, "Wright-Designed Mausoleum is Completed in Forest Lawn," The Landmarker (Newsletter of the Landmark Society of the Niagara Frontier), Fall/Winter 2004, p. 11; Collin Edgar Yeo, "Change of Plans: Does a Frank Lloyd Wright Revival Honor or Betray Him?" The New Republic Online, Nov. 30, 2004, and visit the Web site of the Blue Sky Mausoleum.

Wright’s Fontana Boathouse

In 1910, at the age of 43, Frank Lloyd Wright traveled to Europe to present what would become his most beloved collection of structure illustrations: the Wasmuth Portfolio. One of these famous drawings was something Wright called "Boathouse for the University of Wisconsin Boat Club." Twenty years later, the architect included this same boathouse in an international exhibition of eight of his greatest works. The boathouse idea was obviously a favorite of Wright’s, featuring a classic technique akin to other Buffalo treasures like the Martin House and the late, lamented Larkin Building - large vertical piers supporting horizontal planes. Sadly, it was never constructed. It remained one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most significant projects that had never come to fruition - until now!/p>

Wright’s Fontana Boathouse Formed in 2000, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Rowing Boathouse Corporation acquired the rights to this classic Wright design and raised the $5.4 million needed to realize its construction. The Boathouse is being operated both as an architectural tourist site and as a working boathouse by the West Side Rowing Club, one of the largest rowing clubs in the United States.

Building a previously un-built work by an American master presents special issues. Construction of the boathouse will be faithful to Wright’s design especially to the details and choices of materials he provided. The first floor will be used exactly as Wright intended as the working spaces of a rowing boathouse. The second floor features a club room, locker rooms and east and west facing balconies, with diamond-paned art glass windows, all exactly as Wright designed them.

"After 100 years as a set of drawings gathering dust on a shelf, it is about time this famous Wrightian boathouse will finally come out of the ground and into the light,” said John C. Courtin, a founding director of FLW’s Rowing Boathouse Corporation. “Where better for it to stand than in Buffalo, at water’s edge, beside the venerable West Side Rowing Club, and near other important contemporaneous Wrightian works such as the Darwin D. Martin House and the W.E. Heath House. All these innovative designs, including his rowing boathouse, came off Wright’s drafting table during one intense period of creativity."

Construction of the Boathouse was completed in September 2007. The Boathouse is now open for tours. For more information, visit www.wrightsboathouse.org or call 716-362-3140.

Wright’s Filling Station

Some time soon, construction will begin on another Frank Lloyd Wright design that was never built in the architect’s lifetime. This soon-to-be-realized gem is a 1920s filling station that was planned for a Buffalo oil company, to be built next to the Buffalo Transportation/Pierce-Arrow Museum at Michigan Avenue and Seneca Street in downtown Buffalo.

The two-story, 1,600-square-foot filling station, about 40 by 40 feet, will be built to Wright’s blueprints and specifications. topped with authentic Tydol Oil signs. The station will feature a second story observation room with a fireplace, restrooms, an extensive copper roof, two 45-foot poles that Wright called "totems," red and white painted concrete, and overhead gravity fed tanks. Gasoline will not be pumped because of the overhead tanks and fireplaces. Wright called this design "an ornament to the pavement." Next to the gas station will be a re-creation of a 3,500-square-foot steel and glass greasing station.

The buildings will be an educational facility, not a working one, complementing the museum’s mission of focusing attention on the impact of the automobile on modern America. The greasing station will be used for exhibits, banquets and meetings. Construction of the filling station is planned for 2008.

The boathouse and gas station will join another previously unrealized Wright project, the Blue Sky Mausoleum in Forest Lawn Cemetery, completed in 2004, and the landmark Darwin Martin House Complex and Graycliff Estate, both undergoing multimillion-dollar restorations, making Buffalo one of the must-see centers of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work.