Wright’s Use of Photography Guest Editor:�Susan Jacobs Lockhart

F R A N K L L O Y D W R I G H T B U I L D I N G C O N S E R VA N C Y

F A L L 2 0 1 5 / V O L U M E 6 / I S S U E 2

E D U C A T I O N | A D V O C A C Y | P R E S E R V A T I O N

co

nt

en

tS

1 President’s Message: New Initiatives 2 Wright, Photography and the Design Process

6 Photographs and the Wasmuth Folios

10 Wright and Photography: The Early Years

16 Wright and Fuermann: An Architect and His Photographer

21 Wright’s Reliance on Photography for His Later House Designs 25 Executive Director’s Letter: Committing to the Future

SaveWright is a bi-annual publication of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.

Guest Editor: Susan Jacobs Lockhart Executive Editor: Susan Jacobs Lockhart Managing Editor: Joel Hoglund Copy Editor: Linda Botsford Contributing Editor: Janet Halstead Designer: Debra Nemeth

The mission of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy is to facilitate the preservation and maintenance of the remaining structures designed by Frank Lloyd Wright through education, advocacy and technical services.

tel: 312.663.5500 email: preservation@savewright.org web: savewright.org

© 2015, Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy

editor’s W E L C o M E

The relationship of photography to architecture has become a major interest in recent years. Wright’s use of photography, while significant, has rarely been discussed. This issue sets out to fill that hole.

Wright’s own use of the medium, as revealed by Jack Quinan, began in 1890 with photographs of the early Oak Park house, his family and later the family’s farm property in Wyoming Valley. When he went to work for Adler and Sullivan, Chicago’s principal architectural photographer was Henry Fuermann & Sons. Wright later used Clarence Fuermann to document, for publication purposes, the exterior of Taliesin as soon as it was finished, giving directions of what to shoot and how. The photo proofs sent to Wright, which only recently came to light, are analyzed in Jack Holzhueter’s article.

In his essay on the Wasmuth Portfolio, Anthony Alofsin clarifies how Wright used other Fuermann photographs as the basis for tracing and redrawing the exteriors and interiors of buildings illustrated. The later projects for Death Valley, Lake Tahoe, San Marcos-in-the-Desert and Baghdad are the sub-ject of Neil Levine’s research. In all of these we are shown how Wright used photographs in different ways to develop his preliminary ideas.

During the 1940s and ’50s photos of sites were requested from clients for use in the preliminary design phase when Wright could not visit the property. Curtis Besinger, in his book Working with Mr. Wright: What It Was Like, mentions that Wright would leave pictures out on his desk as a stimulus for ideas. The Walton House site in Modesto, California, was one of many Wright was not able to visit. As illustrated here, the clients furnished 8-by-10-inch photos, annotated with descriptive information.

My personal experience, as a nine-year-old daughter of clients commissioning the second Jacobs House (1943) was different. My parents purchased a farm with a potential building site on a slop-ing piece of land, and requested Wright to visit. He and his wife stopped by one day on their way from Spring Green to Madison and walked through a field of clover to the top of the rise. My father described the scene in his book, Building with Wright. “Wright [surveyed the scene], with his usual sense of the dramatic … his cane waved in the air as he marched to and fro across the clover. ‘It’s just as if he was making music with his cane,’ Susan whispered. He finally chose a spot [for the house], and pointed his cane to the ground. We’ll have the barn … down there … and here [the view] all before you … [as] the cane swept toward the horizon three miles away.” Photos were not needed.

Susan Jacobs Lockhart Guest editor

wright and photography

Susan Jacobs Lockhart is a past Conservancy president and board member from 1996-2002 and 2006 to present. A Taliesin Fellow-ship member for 45 years, she worked in all areas of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s activities, and as a board member from 1990-1994 and 2011 to present. From her base in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Lockhart works on commis-sions for architectural glass, steel sculpture, wood plate art and licensed products for J. Charles Crystalworks.

AB

oU

t

tH

e

ed

ito

r

1

ron ScherubelGuest editor

president’s M E S S A G E

richard LongstrethPresident

I want to update you on some of the initiatives that have been important parts of the work undertaken by the board and the staff during the summer months. Progress has been made on revamping the website so that it will be more useful and reliable in the future. This project has taken a lot of time in order to craft a program that will be optimal for our needs and within budget. We hope to consummate this change by the early months of 2016.

A major step has occurred in our building inventory project with the hiring of John Waters as a consultant to begin developing a comprehensive database on all extant Wright-designed properties. He will be working closely with the Advocacy Committee, Architectural Advisory Committee and the Action Plan task force in creating both the objectives and specifications. It will aid the Conservancy’s ongoing efforts to ensure the protection of this priceless legacy through viable means. Ultimately, we would like to have a full-time staff member assigned to this crucial component of our work. When completed, this database should prove very helpful to property owners seeking advice on a wide range of matters related to their Wright buildings.

Site visits to the 10 buildings we have nominated to the World Heritage List will be undertaken by two ICOMOS representatives in September. Lynda Wag-goner, Scott Perkins and Janet Halstead have worked

closely with the 10 sites on orchestrating their tight and complex schedules. We hope the outcome next summer will be entirely positive. Besides our friends at the National Park Service, I would like to thank Jan Anderson, chair of US/ICOMOS, for her ongoing behind-the-scenes work on behalf of this project.

Thanks to Ron Scherubel, Denise Hice, Dale Gyure, Joel Hoglund and many others, our annual meeting in Milwaukee promises to be a superb one. No other state save Illinois comes close to matching the ar-ray of Wright’s work found in Wisconsin. We will be able to see much of this spectrum—from economical, standardized designs intended for mass production to grand urban and country houses, designs spanning over a half-century, to the SC Johnson headquar-ters and the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church. Wright’s reconstructed Bachman-Wilson house and a rich selection of the work of E. Fay Jones (who, Charles Moore once said, was “one of the few archi-tects to get Wright right”) awaits us in Arkansas next spring, followed by the 2016 annual conference based in downtown San Francisco. Thanks to Neil Levine, we have begun planning what will be a really extraor-dinary conference on the occasion of the sesquicenten-nial of Wright’s birth in 2017. Stay tuned.

As always, your generous support allows us to press forward on all these fronts. We are very grateful for your sustained contributions and enthusiasm. And please share with us any ideas you have for what else we might do, or might do better.

new initiatives

CovEr PHoTo: GArDENS AND PASTUrE BELoW THE SoUTHEAST SIDE oF TALIESIN. HENry FUErMANN & SoNS PHoTo CoUrTESy oF THE WISCoNSIN HISTorICAL SoCIETy.

2

There was obviously a hand within that sleeve and a mind directing the hand, but Wright usually left few traces of the design process. There are no sketchbooks filled with jottings or thoughts and rarely a sequence of preliminary sketches explaining how a concept was given form. One of Wright’s foremost European admirers in the 1920s, the Dutch De Stijl member J.J.P. Oud wrote in the 1925 issue of the arts journal Wendingen devoted to Wright that “whereas … even the work of the cleverest nearly always betrays how it grew to be such as it is, with Wright everything is, without being at all perceptible [that it took] any mental exertions to produce.” His “process” of design, Oud asserted, “remains … a perfect mystery.”

Between the proverbial blank page and the already fully composed sketch plan and elevation that often represent Wright’s initial idea for a project was there then nothing? An attention to the study of iconography has revealed that in more cases than we might think, an image, such as the Tower of Babel, a Precolumbian ruin or the Pont du Gard, lay at the source of Wright’s initial concept for a building. But, was the paper always blank? Could Wright have started with some form of template or guide? I want to suggest that at certain moments in his career photography served such a mediating role, either directly or indirectly. A photograph or photographic process can reduce or even

Neil Levine has authored numerous publications on Wright, including The Archi-tecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. A companion volume titled The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright, for which he received grants from the Guggenheim and Graham foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities, will appear in the fall of 2015. He is the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Research Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Har-vard University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

AB

oU

t

tH

e

AU

tH

or

Wright, Photography and the design ProcessB y n e i L L e v i n e

A common conception, promoted by the architect himself, is that Wright

produced designs effortlessly and more or less spontaneously. He described it

as “shaking designs out of his sleeve.”

The A.M. Johnson Ranch project (1924-25) in Death Valley, California.

IMA

GE

CO

URT

ESY

OF

THE

FRA

Nk

LLO

YD W

RIG

HT

FOU

ND

ATI

ON

ARC

HIV

ES

(TH

E M

USE

UM

OF

MO

DER

N A

RT |

AV

ERY

ARC

HIT

ECTU

RAL

& F

INE

ART

S LI

BRA

RY,

CO

LUM

BIA

UN

IVER

SITY

, NEW

YO

Rk)

Johnson Ranch project. Preliminary plan.

IMA

GE

CO

URT

ESY

OF

THE

FRA

Nk

LLO

YD W

RIG

HT

FOU

ND

ATI

ON

ARC

HIV

ES (T

HE

MU

SEU

M O

F M

OD

ERN

ART

| A

VER

Y A

RCH

ITEC

TURA

L &

FIN

E A

RTS

LIB

RARY

, CO

LUM

BIA

UN

IVER

SITY

, NEW

YO

Rk)

Johnson Ranch project. Preliminary sketch on photograph.

IMA

GE

CO

URT

ESY

OF

THE

FRA

Nk

LLO

YD W

RIG

HT

FOU

ND

ATI

ON

ARC

HIV

ES (T

HE

MU

SEU

M O

F M

OD

ERN

ART

| A

VER

Y A

RCH

ITEC

TURA

L &

FIN

E A

RTS

LIB

RARY

, CO

LUM

BIA

UN

IVER

SITY

, NEW

YO

Rk)

3

eliminate the notion of spontaneous generation at the same time as it gives an incipient reality to what might otherwise be the blank slate of the unmarked sheet of paper.

One of the most extraordinary projects in Wright’s career was the paradigm-shifting design for the Death Valley Ranch he produced in 1924-25 for Albert M. Johnson, the wealthy owner and president of the Chicago-based National Life Insurance Company of America. It was Wright’s first design for the desert and would serve as the model for his later work in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, including the San Marcos-in-the-Desert Hotel (1928-29) and Taliesin West (begun 1938). A key feature of all these works was a new type of asymmetrical planning based on the use of diago-nal axes, which echoed the shapes of the surrounding mountains and closely followed the shifting planes of the arid terrain. To imagine the form this new con-cept would take, Wright first outlined the design on photographs of the site, from which the final plan and perspectival renderings were developed.

The commission represents Wright’s first contact with the desert. Death Valley was a fitting introduction to its most extreme conditions. When Wright visited the site in the early months of 1924, there was as yet no paved road in the dry ancient lake basin. The site for Johnson’s winter residence was an elevated can-yon in the remote, northern reaches of the valley. It was defined by steeply sloping, angled planes wedged between hills on both sides, the canyon itself pointing down to the valley floor and focusing the view toward the high mountain range on its western edge. Wright planned continuous, horizontally delineated, low-lying walled precincts of reinforced concrete block that were linked to one another and to the landscape by terraces and causeways. Like an earthwork, the architecture adopted what Wright later called the desert’s char-acteristic “striated and stratified” masses of “nature masonry” to define its relationship to the site. The novel asymmetrical plan based on a non-orthogonal 30-60 degree geometry articulated that relationship in

a dynamic give-and-take that responded to the angles of the mountain slopes and physically linked the structure and its indoor-outdoor spaces to the larger aspects of the site and environment.

Although Johnson had constructed temporary living quarters a couple of years before, the accommodations were fairly basic, if not primitive, and it is doubtful that Wright spent more than a night or two at the site. He apparently did a rough draft of a topographi-cal survey over which the preliminary plan was later drawn. The plan followed the outlines of two per-spective sketches done on color photographs. The

The A.M. Johnson Ranch project (1924-25) in Death Valley, California.

There are no sketchbooks filled with

jottings or thoughts and rarely a sequence

of preliminary sketches explaining how a

concept was given form.

San Marcos-in-the-Desert Hotel project (1928-29), Phoenix, Arizona. Panoramic photos of view from site.

IMA

GE

CO

URT

ESY

OF

THE

FRA

Nk

LLO

YD W

RIG

HT

FOU

ND

ATI

ON

ARC

HIV

ES

(TH

E M

USE

UM

OF

MO

DER

N A

RT |

AV

ERY

ARC

HIT

ECTU

RAL

& F

INE

ART

S LI

BRA

RY,

CO

LUM

BIA

UN

IVER

SITY

, NEW

YO

Rk)

Lake Tahoe Resort project (1923-24), Lake Tahoe, California/Nevada.

PHO

TOM

ON

TAG

E FR

OM

H. D

E FR

IES,

FrA

nk

LLo

yd W

rIg

hT

(BER

LIN

, 192

6)

4

photographs were enlarged and retouched to receive Wright’s initial ideas for dealing with a type of land-scape he had not previously encountered. The photo-graphs offered a solid ground in an otherwise un-stable seeming, constantly shifting topography. With the photographic documents as the ground, Wright conceived his structures as extrusions and extensions of the rocky landscape forms to which the plan gave form and emphasis.

The idea of working from a topographical survey map and photographic documentation of the site became a common practice of Wright’s in the later years of his career, especially when he was unable to visit sites in person. Another article in this issue (“Wright’s Reli-ance on Photography for His Later House Designs,” p. 21) deals with the practice as it was employed in later residential architecture, more often than not for commissions of a relatively modest or, at least, standard character for Wright’s office. I know of only one case where it occurred in commissions of a more elaborate sort, although there are surely others. The one I have in mind is similar to the Johnson Death

Valley Ranch in terms of its singularity and signifi-cance. This is the project Wright did in 1957 for the Baghdad Opera House and Cultural Center. Wright visited the site and in fact chose the site. He drew one of his initial sketches on aerial photographs of it that he had requested of the government agency in charge of the project. The photographs were done by the British firm of Hunting Aerosurveys in 1951. Wright used two of the large sheets, joined them together, and inverted them so that the south was at the top in the direction the Tigris River flows. He drew in bold strokes of red pencil his design over the black, white and gray background of the city that functioned as a kind of photographic topographical map.

Wright used photography in more ways than one in the design process. Again, the documentation is slim but the evidence that we have is telling. Two impor-tant instances occur around the same time as the Death Valley commission. This may not be simply coincidence since the other two commissions I shall refer to are also for extraordinary sites; and maybe even more important, it was during the mid- and later 1920s that Wright employed several younger Europe-ans in his office, and it was in Europe that avant-garde architects made photography an important element in architectural design.

A few years after the Death Valley job fell through, Wright got his next chance to use the ideas he had learned about planning for the desert in the short-lived project for the San Marcos-in-the-Desert Hotel. The luxury winter resort, designed in 1928-29 for the Salt River (later Phoenix South) Mountains, looked out over what Wright described in his Autobiography as the “weird, colorful, wide-sweeping terrain” of the vast “pure desert of Arizona.” A major feature of the terraced, south-facing hotel was to be the view out over the “undefiled” desert landscape. And so, un-like Death Valley, where Wright sketched the building design against the mountain backdrop, here he used a panoramic collage of photographs looking from the hotel site to bring to mind the critical features of the views in that direction.

Photography could be used, therefore, not only as an aid to design as such but also as a way either of study-ing the design as it proceeded through development or as a way to represent the design in an early stage of production and dissemination. About the same time as the Death Valley commission, he made use of the radically new technique of photomontage, champi-oned by El Lissitzky, Mart Stam, Mies van der Rohe and others in Europe, to represent the Lake Tahoe Resort project of 1923-24 in its landscape setting. The most well-known parts of this design are the numer-ous shore cabins and houseboats or barges based on complex non-orthogonal geometries and using wood-shingled forms reminiscent of Native American

Opera House and Cultural Center project (1957), Baghdad. Preliminary sketch plan on conjoined aerial photographs.

IMA

GE

CO

URT

ESY

OF

THE

FRA

Nk

LLO

YD W

RIG

HT

FOU

ND

ATI

ON

ARC

HIV

ES (T

HE

MU

SEU

M O

F M

OD

ERN

ART

| A

VER

Y A

RCH

ITEC

TURA

L &

FIN

E A

RTS

LIB

RARY

, CO

LUM

BIA

UN

IVER

SITY

, NEW

YO

Rk)