"Frank Lloyd Wright and San Francisco" Paul V. Turner at the San Francisco Public Library

I'm starting with this photograph of right arriving at the San Francisco Airport in 1957 which I found in the San Francisco Chronicle's photo archive because I loved the fact that he looks so vigorous and energetic only about a month before his 90th birthday also I'd like to imagine that his evident good spirits here were due to his pleasure in coming back once more to this city that he genuinely enjoyed being in as we know from his correspondence and interviews well first let me mention how I got involved in this subject of Frank Lloyd Wright's work in the San Francisco area during the years that I taught the history of architecture at Stanford one of the courses I gave was a seminar on right and we would take field trips to his buildings in the Bay Area such as his a wonderful shop on Maiden Lane here in the in the city just off of Union Square originally the VC Morris shop and I'll say more about this building later and this got me interested especially in rights projects designed for the Bay Area both the built and the unbuilt projects and I started doing research on the topic more recently when I would tell people that I was writing a book on Wright's Bay Area works a common response was well what is there there's the Marin County Civic Center people would point out and in San Rafael and that shop on Maiden Lane that we just saw and a few houses but is that really enough for a book that was sometimes what people would tell me and they were always surprised when I told them that in fact wright-designed roughly 30 projects for the Bay Area although only about a third of them were actually built and I'll say something later about why so many of them were not built here's a map that I created showing the locations of all of these projects you probably can't see the numbers there but they're numbers a number for each of the projects and they correspond to a list next to the map in the in the book moreover these projects include some of Wright's most unusual and innovative designs for example his first design for a skyscraper of 1913 the call building was to be on Market Street Market and for the streets here in the city and even though it wasn't constructed it was one of Wright's favorite designs and he built a couple of large models of it one of which we see here on the on the right which he kept behind his drafting table at Taliesin his home and studio in Wisconsin if built this would have been the tallest building west of Chicago at this time and it was also one of the most advanced skyscraper and designs of that of that time another of Wright's Bay Area projects was a very unusual mortuary complex of 1947 the Daphne funeral chapels to be a church and DuBose streets here in the city next to the San Francisco mint which we see in this some in this drawing by right to one of Wright's drawings of the project and we see of course up at the top here there's the San Francisco mint which are probably familiar with up it just off of Market Street your DuBose and when when Wright first went to the site and asked mr. Daphne what the large building was up on the on the rock and Daphne said it was the San Francisco mint Wright said we'll make the mint look like a morgue and the and your morgue look like a mint and also another one of his projects for the Bay Area a small Christian Science church for Bolinas in Marin County of 1956 again not never built and an amazing industrial plant and company headquarters for San Carlos on the peninsula also of the mid 50s which would have been Wright's largest structure if it had been built using the structural system Wright had created in the 1930s for the Johnson administration building in racing Wisconsin with these innovative and remarkably slender lily pad columns as they're sometimes called and a fanciful wedding chapel commissioned by the Clermont Hotel in the Berkeley Oakland Hills and various structures for the Marin County Fairgrounds adjacent to the Civic Center including a fare pavilion which we see at the top there with a tent-like roof suspended on cables and an amphitheater and an amazing reinforced concrete bridge for the San Francisco Bay that right called the butterfly bridge which he started working on in 1949 though he never actually received the Commission for it from the estate and later I'll say more about this project also and some of Wright's house projects for the Bay Area were also extremely innovative for example the Hana house of 1937 at Stanford was the first time that he was able to talk a client into constructing a type of building he had been thinking about for for a number of years with a plan based totally on non rectangular geometry in this case the hexagon and we can see here if you can see the plan clearly enough that that there are no right angles in the plan at all it's totally sixty and a hundred degrees angles based on a on a hexagon grid and as a result right sometimes called this the honeycomb house and he did this really as a furtherance of his desire to break open the box as he put it of conventional architecture and as I say this was the first time that he had found a client willing to build a structure with this non rectangular geometry and this really inaugurated an important characteristic of Wright's later work the use of non rectangular geometry such as triangles hexagons and circles another house in the Bay Area that's of interest the Berger house in San Anselmo in Marin County is unusual for a for a different reason the man who commissioned it Bob Berger a teacher constructed it for his family totally by himself and as a result it took him nearly 20 years to to build probably the longest construction job of any of Wright's buildings and the construction was especially difficult for Berger because right had given him a design using what he called desert masonry construction and this some required building forms and in the next slide here we see photographs taken at different times of Bob Berger working on this house over the years photographs taken by his family and a couple of his sons were kind enough to give me these photographs and so up at the top here we see him building the the forms for these for these walls and then the splitting large stones and we see him doing that over over here to give them more or less flat surfaces then placing them in the forms and such a way that when the concrete is poured and the forms removed the stones are visible on the surface of the walls right had first used this kind of construction at Taliesin West his winter home in studio in Arizona in the 1930s and the bra the burger house is unusual for another reason its rights only house for which he also designed a separate structure for the family dog at the request of one of Bergers sons so its rights only doghouse and among rights some unconstructed house projects for the Bay Area are a couple of his most spectacular designs such as this one designed in 1945 for Lillian and VC Morris the people who commissioned the shop on Maiden Lane the house being directly on the ocean in the Seacliff neighborhood of San Francisco on on Camino Del Mar if you're familiar with that that area down below Lincoln Park the design was so unusual and the site so precipitous right on the cliffside there that it turned out to be too difficult or expensive to construct right then came up with some other designs for this site such as another one here they almost equally amazing and dramatic but none of them got built even though the Morrises loved the designs especially the the first one well another interesting thing about rights projects for the Bay Area is that they range over virtually his entire career the first one for a small house in Oakland dates from around 1900 almost at the beginning of his career just as he was starting to develop his prairie house style in the Chicago area which you may be familiar with some of his most famous buildings date from that Perry house period and this is a mysterious design which I'm sorry is a little hard to see here I've took three details from the design that are all on on one rather large sheet of paper that was discovered in Wright's studio following his death and there's no other information about this design it doesn't even identify the the clients name on the drawing or the address in Oakland but it does say down at the bottom dwelling for Oakland California Frank Lloyd Wright architect Chicago Illinois partly based on that the fact that he when he had his office in Chicago and also based on the style of the drawing and even more on the style of the the design of the house it's clear that it has to date from about 1900 this house really we see here in a sense the beginning of the of the Prairie house style of his development of the Prairie house style with an emphasis up so I didn't want to move ahead I wanted to use my light pointer here to point out the horizontal emphasis on the horizontal with hipped roofs windows banked together to create openings in the upper part of the wall and one very strange detail is probably a little hard for you to see but the floor plan is composed of two squares that are overlapped or intersect something very kind of unprecedented at the time but something that bright was playing with at the beginning and to develop this idea of more fluid and more complex planning types and there are other details in this design which show that it has to date from just around 1900 just at the beginning of his career so we have a entered city the earliest design by right for any location really west of West of the Middle West and so we have for one of Wright's earliest designs here in the Bay Area no not built as far as we know the other interesting thing is that it's not known whether this was ever built so conceivably it was but we since we don't know the address and or the clients name we really don't know and I've had a couple of people in the Oakland planning office who have been helping me to try to learn more about see if we can find anything about this this mysterious project and and at the end of Wright's career are several of his Bay Area projects such as the Marin County Civic Center which we saw before here's one of his overall drawings for the Civic Center which he began working on in 1957 but was still designing when he died in 59 and in fact one of Wright's very last Commission's that he received was just before his death in April 1959 and it was for a church in San Francisco the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church which was to be on Brotherhood way in the southwest part of the city he was just beginning to sketch out his ideas for the project and we see some of these sketches here just a few days before he died at the age of 91 in April of 59 and as sketchy as these are they show right approaching this design in a fresh and innovative way to the extent that I've been able to sort of decipher what what he had in mind in these in these sketches even at his advanced age and in failing health I think it's best for me to take questions after the after the talk then but thank you I wanted I want to entertain your question when I began working on the book and decided to include rights unbuilt projects as well as the constructed ones I realized that people might wonder why so many of them that were not built as I mentioned only about 1/3 of the projects were constructed here's I'll show one more of the unhung constructed house projects the Hargrove house in Orinda for orinda which would have been one of Wright's most impressive houses and since there's that stereotype about right that you may have heard stories about that he was difficult to deal with and sometimes treated his clients badly I realized that some people would assume that this was probably the cause of these projects not getting constructed so I decided I had to try to find out the reasons for each of the unbuilt projects now actually when I mentioned to a couple of my friends who were practicing architects that only about one-third of Wright's Bay Area projects were constructed they told me that this wasn't that unusual for many architects but even so I wanted to be able to answer the question and I decided that I had to get access to the correspondence between Wright and the clients of all these projects correspondence that's mostly in the Frank Lloyd Wright archives which used to be a Taliesin West in Arizona but is now at the Avery Library in New York and with this correspondence hundreds of letters and other documents I was able to determine the reasons that each of these projects wasn't built and it turns out that there were many different reasons but surprisingly almost none of them had to do with right treating the clients badly this actually surprised me a bit in a few cases it was actually the clients who were difficult to deal with and in some cases the designs were so unusual that construction would have been difficult or too expensive as I mentioned in the case of that Seacliff designed for the for the Morrises here we see that again or the client simply found the designs too strange to accept and this was the case with a house that Wright designed in 1939 for a mr. and mrs. Smith in Piedmont Pines in the East Bay the site reminded Wright of the Lake Tahoe site where in the 1920s he had designed a group of buildings here's one of them that were never constructed using a kind of Indian tepee shape and he decided that this would be perfect for the Piedmont Pines site that the Smith said which had similar topography he felt but the Smith's apparently found the design too peculiar and got into an argument with Wright and this is these are things I discovered by going through all of this correspondence between Wright and the clients so they had a difficult argumentative meeting and they refused to pay him the fee they owed him for the preliminary design which the correspondence reveals was only two hundred and forty dollars it's amazing that and this was but they wouldn't even pay him two hundred forty dollars for all the work he had done to do to design this now this this by the way was one of the very few cases I found about kind of an unpleasant situation between right and one of his Bay Area clients and in a couple of cases that call building skyscraper and the butterfly bridge there actually was no client right simply did the design in the hope that it would get built so that's another reason that some of these projects didn't get built that there wasn't actually a client and then there were some unexpected reasons why a building wasn't constructed for example house the Wright designed in 1954 a man named Robert Bush and his wife at Stanford he was a young a faculty member at Stanford and they were he and his wife were friends of the Hana's who had built the Hannah house in the 1930s well the Bush's found right to be very amiable as seen in their letters and they loved the design that he produced for them which we see here and were all ready to build it but then there's a sad letter in the in the archive from Robert Bush to write reporting that their daughter had been stricken with polio and because of this and all the medical expenses they would have to forget about building the house but he added that of course they would pay the fee they still owed right for the design as soon as they could well as I was going through the correspondence the next the next letter was from right immediately writing back to to Robert Bush expressing his sympathy for their daughter and saying quote don't worry about paying us so there's a story that sort of contradicts the the stereotype of right has always been mean to his clients I have to say that reading the hundreds of letters between Wright and his Bay Area clients most of which had never been looked at by scholars before as far as I know was one of the most compelling and sometimes touching aspects of this research project for me and I decided to include in the book all of these stories of Wright's relationships with his Bay Area clients well another aspect of Wright's work in the Bay Area is that San Francisco is the only place where he had a branch office that is separate from Taliesin in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona in 1951 when he started getting quite a lot of work in the Bay Area he asked one of his former Taliesin apprentices Aaron green to be his associate in San Francisco and here we see the two of them in a later photograph and they opened an office on Grant Avenue in downtown San Francisco and here's the here's the building it's at the building is still there it's at 319 Grant Avenue on the second floor right designed the office interior and here we see his plan that he worked on with his with his notes on it it was actually an ingenious design for the interior this office with the screen like walls made of redwood slats and translucent glass oops again I meant to use my light pointer rather than the advance here are these screen like walls set at suggesting the hexagonal geometry perhaps of the Hana house creating three spaces the drafting room a an entrance area and the and a private office but allowing because this the the set translucent glass these screen like walls it allowed some natural light and also visual privacy in each of these three spaces so it was very clever designed for a space that only had windows on one on one side here of course looking out on Grant Avenue it was a somewhat difficult design problem and here we see what the office actually looked like the private office and reception area at the top and then the drafting room below although we're not seeing it here in its original location on Grant Avenue after Wright's death in 1959 Aaron green continued to use the office but then had to leave the building and he dismantled the the office interior and was later installed in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh where we see it here but then in this office interior has a strange kind of Odyssey as a history because in nineteen in 2004 it was dismantled again and sold to a collector in Buffalo New York and it's been in storage there ever since and it's been a fond hope of mine to have it returned to San Francisco someday and installed somewhere here well now I'm going to turn to another aspect of the story of Frank Lloyd Wright in San Francisco which is the various ways that he was covered in the local press and to get this information I spent countless hours here in the newspaper archives in the public library up on the fifth floor and also found material in the history room on the on the sixth floor in the 1940s and 50s the later part of Wright's career the Bay Area newspapers covered him in basically two ways on the one hand there were stories about his projects in the Bay Area as we would expect here we see on the left a full page article about his design for for his butterfly bridge to go across the San Francisco Bay and on the upper right there a story about his hiring by Marin County to design the Civic Center in an article about his adavi mortuary design you can see the it's titled death and taxes and this refers to one of Wright's quips about the proximity of the mortuary to the mint which is described in that little article so that was one type of newspaper coverage about right the right just mentioned the right had a distinctive and sometimes wicked sense of humor for example he later recalled that he had to visit in connection with designing the the daphne mortuary complex that he either said he had to visit several other mortuaries with mr. Daphne to learn about what they required into programmatic requirements of designing mortuaries and and he said quote this nearly got me down I would come back home wondering if I felt as well as I should but Daphne had a way of referring to the deceased as the merchandise and that would cheer me up but another kind of press coverage during this period was about the often opinionated statements that Wright made in interviews and talks during his many visits to San Francisco in general write disliked American cities and the architecture in them and he didn't spare the buildings in San Francisco calling them for example shanty architecture and saying on one occasion it's time you had another earthquake here yet otherwise he liked to the city perhaps it's the only American city that he did genuinely like on one of his visits in 1944 he said the following San Francisco is the most charming city in America and the most cosmopolitan and picturesque but the most backward city architectural II yet it manages because of the character of its hills and environment and its people who are the best looking in the country well I like that and then he continues I don't know how much of this is due to natural advantages or accident but I like San Francisco as far as I know that's a hit it's about the only city that in America that he ever said anything like that about so positive so in his um in his later years it was Wright's designs as well as his opinions on things that were reported in the press and also the various things he did while in San Francisco such as a roundtable forum that he participated in in 1949 on Modern Art in which he played the gadfly making all sorts of controversial statements about Contemporary Art in society which got widely reported in the local press for example he got into a couple of big arguments in this forum with the artist Marcel Duchamp who was also on the panel here we see in one of the their sessions here's right and here's Marcel Duchamp down there and they got into some amazing arguments and I had to get the transcripts of the this whole of these sessions from the San Francisco Art Institute who and at one point and another one of the sessions the one at the bottom here and here we see right at the at the end of this table here he one of the after right was making controversial statements one of the other participants interrupted and said what mr. Wright is saying is sheer nonsense which naturally did not sit well with Wright and things started going downhill from then on but what's interesting is that the newspaper stories that San Franciscans first read about Wright many years earlier were very different from this they had almost nothing to do with his architecture or his public statements but with the scandals and tragedies in his personal life in the 1910s and 20s in nineteen nine right had left his wife and family and gone to Europe with the wife of one of his former clients the woman they may Matt Borthwick Cheney and when they returned in 1911 he built the first Taliesin in Wisconsin as their new home mainly they get away from Chicago and to try to avoid the negative publicity about their relationship and then in August 1914 there was this terrible event reported here in the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner those two stories in which named aboard ouack and her two children were murdered along with four other people at Taliesin murdered by a servant who had apparently become deranged and the house was was partially burned down the article hear from the examiner though owned up there the article and then the next morning says that three people were killed because it wasn't yet known that seven had died and more details of the tragedy kept being reported day after day in this in the San Francisco newspapers along with the story of Wright's relationship with Mema Borthwick making him out to be a disreputable or at least extremely unconventional character and for many years virtually the only news about right in the San Francisco newspapers and this was what I discovered by really going through all of these newspaper going working in the newspaper archives here in the library about the only news about Wright was about these personal problems of his as he finally then in the succeeding years divorced his first wife married another woman Miriam Noel then separated from her and met Olga vana milonov who eventually became his third wife and actually contributed to the success of his career in several ways for the rest his life but in the 1920s these personal problems involved all sorts of legal battles and disputes which the newspapers loved there were times I found that day after day there would be in the San Francisco newspapers in the early and mid 20s there would be one story after another about Franklin raised problems or his these of women in his lives it was like a long-running soap opera and in 1927 there was a local angle to the story when Miriam Noel his estranged second wife who had disappeared from Chicago several months earlier as according to the press was found hiding in San Francisco as the paper said in an apartment building at 9:25 Sutter Street on lower Nob Hill where she gave several sensational interviews to the papers attacking Wright and Olga vana every tc2 of the stories from the from the examiner and then the one on the left here here's Miriam Noel and right of course and this is Olga vana in the in the first story in February she was quoted as saying I've been here in San Francisco for my health this is a Miriam no Elvis quoted as saying the shock and publicity that followed my husband's devotion devotion to Madame milonov which has so completely undermined my health that I'm a nervous wreck I came out here to recover and I've succeeded wonderfully California is wonderful I've gained 30 pounds since I've been here she said she apparently liked San Francisco cuisine well Miriam stayed here in San Francisco until September when her divorce from Wright was finally settled the photograph on the right shows her boarding a train for Los Angeles and she was quoted as saying I've had several offers from Hollywood and I'm going to drop in tomorrow and have some screen tests taken I might stay and work in a picture and then go on to Paris I'm going to drown my sorrows in art so what's interesting I think the reason I bring this all up is that for many years the general public heard mainly about these scandalous and sensational aspects of Wright's life and it wasn't until later that newspapers began reporting on his architecture in a serious way and this early focus on the scandalous or tragic aspects of his personal life collared the public perception of right to some extent for the rest of his life I think most books on Wright's architecture don't mention or tend to avoid these more sordid topics but I decided that they were relevant to the larger question of how Wright and his architecture were perceived by the by the general public next let me mention a couple of Wright's buildings in the Bay Area that I haven't shown so far first is one called the Bueller house in Orinda of 1948 in most ways it's typical of Wright's Usonian house type that he was developing he who had developed in the 1930s with concrete slab floors and radiant heating and other features that made them a somewhat less expensive prototype for middle-class suburban housing but the Buehler house here has some unusual traits not usually found in the youths onehans especially a large octagonal dying living room which we see in this photograph with a sloping plain for a roof not the normal way you'd think of roofing an octagon which creates a very dramatic interior space it's a really beautiful room and a another house I want to show here the Basset house in Hillsborough which has a hexagonal plan like the earlier Hana house though it's a completely different plan and in a smaller house but one of the most interesting things about about this house has to do with the people who lived here first were the Bassets Sidney and Louise Bassett who built it in 1940 and loved the house but only lived in it for two or three years due to personal problems then they rented it for for two or three years and then was bought by young refugees from Europe lewis and betty frank who lived there for the rest of their lives and had right design a small addition to the house so it's sometimes called the basset frank house but the person who rented the house in the early 1940s before the Franks bought it was a man named Joseph eichler who at that time worked in his family's wholesale food business but he got to love the house so much that he became interested in architecture and several years later bought a company that produced tract houses but he wanted to create a better type of tract housing than existed and he hired the architect Robert Anson and then later some other architects who and Robert Anson had first designed prototypes for Highclere that were simplified versions of Wright's Usonian houses and here we see a very early ad in the from the Palo Alto Times for advertising these Eichler homes as they were called you can see the full price of it is ninety four hundred dollars and immense this led to more fully developed designs for these eichler homes thousands of which as you probably know were built in the Bay Area and and elsewhere but mainly in the Bay Area and they were widely published and one architectural awards and had an important influence on post war suburban house design in America an eichler later on acknowledged fully the influence of the that riot and the Basset house had had on him he later said about living in the basset house for just that was two or three years he said it was a it was a revelation to me I admired Wright's rich design and asked myself if such houses could be built for ordinary people so one of Wright's Bay Area buildings had an unexpected and significant effect on American suburban architecture well now let's look more closely at the at the VC Morris shop on Maiden Lane here in the city as I mentioned before right was commissioned in 1944 to design a house for the Morris's Lillian and VC he was always called VC Morris and it took me a while to find his full name is his full name was vir chase Morris but for some reason he insisted on just being known as VC Morris and that was the name of their shop but but before the the shop was designed they had commissioned him to design their house for their property at at Sea Cliff on Camino del Mar and we saw before this amazing design that that he came up with and for several years they kept pursuing this house project trying to get it to work and to be feasible and Wright produced other designs for the site we saw one of those before and in the process right and the Morrises became good friends and there's a photograph I found of Wright and Lillian Morris at Stimson Stinson Beach where they had some property and they asked right - this was later in the 1950s they asked him to design a beach house for them at Stinson Beach and he did he designed that house but which also was not built for very there were other reasons why that one wasn't built out of the Aaron green who who had worked on these projects on the later projects for the Morris's with right Aaron green was later in an oral interview asked if Wright ever got discouraged because none of his house projects for the Morrises was constructed and he said no he liked the Morris's so much that he just kept trying then in 1947 they mentioned - right that they were planning to remodel their shop on Maiden Lane there they their shop was just in an undistinguished small building on Maiden Lane and much to their surprise he offered to do the design for them it was surprising because right almost never took remodeling jobs he considered it beneath his dignity or that he wasn't that they wouldn't give him an opportunity to do interesting enough projects but but he accepted in this case and I think the reason is that that I think it clearly had to do with the Guggenheim Museum in New York because beginning in about 1943 early earlier in the 40s riot had been working on his design for the Guggenheim Museum for for Solomon Guggenheim in New York here we see some of his his drawings as he was trying to work out the design and they but the process kept dragging out and kept being delayed in a way who was unclear whether it was really going to be built and he was exploring various ways of dealing with the concept of a spiral ramp as the basic form of this museum this building and wasn't until the late 50s that the museum was actually constructed so I think that Wright took on the Morris job in 1947 because he saw here an opportunity by completely redesigning the Morrises shop to explore on a miniature scale the Guggenheim concept of a spiral ramp as the centerpiece of a building whose function was the display of objects so in that sense that the programs were very similar and here I have views of the of the two buildings the Guggenheim on the right of course and the VC amorous shop on the on the left and the Morris shop was constructed in 1949 long before the Guggenheim got built so there's this fascinating relationship between these two projects and with the Morris shop right in a sense was doing a kind of small-scale tryout of the Guggenheim concept and if we look at one of the look at a detail of one of rights section drawings for the shop we see that he was even thinking of how to display some of the Morris's merchandise on the ramp itself in in circular recesses in the in the in the walls and this is in fact how how it was constructed and and used here we see a photo of it taken right after the construction of the shop when it was still the vc Morris shop well this turned out to be one of Wright's own favorite buildings and whenever he came to San Francisco we would visit it it was on his walk from the st. Francis hotel where he usually stayed to his office with Aaron green on Grant Avenue and Greene later recounted how Wright would often enter the shop and rearrange the merchandise and her a typical of right here we just see another another view of the of the interior right after its construction although Greene added when he does described how Wright would do this he added if I came back the next day everything would be right back where I was before mr. Wright had been there and in writes design for the exterior of the shop though it may look rather plain at first is also really an extraordinary design with a number of subtle and unusual details I mention that the shop has been sold recently and that it does not have a new tenant yet so it's it's closed now so you can't go in the shop now but of course you can go there and see this exterior for example on the exterior here the main surface is pulled out just slightly from the surrounding frame and you can't see that too well here but it says it's as if there's a kind of frame around it and then the central part of it is is pulled out and in the bold arched entryway there is emphasized by a series of recessed bands as you can see and on the left side is a column of removed bricks which are lit at night and have a this is an old photograph taken right after the construction of the building and have a counterpoint in a horizontal row as you can see of lit squares at the base of the building and here we see another more recent view of that and though that but then there's an amazing detail which is normally not pointed out I think in discussions of of this building in the right literature in the tunnel like entrance there that you go through to enter the building the the the vault in this tunnel like entrance is brick on one side and I have to think I have the next slide here that shows that better yep is brick on one side but glass on the other which had never been done before as far as I know it was really somewhat unprecedented and shows that Wright was willing to violate the conventional logic or rules of architectural logic in a way that most architects probably would not have dared to do a vault after all should be made of a continuous material so he's doing something very odd here and in this and many other ways this is really a remarkable building and in my opinion is one of Wright's most brilliant designs both inside and out and as I say the building has was recently sold and we'll have a new commercial tenant I've actually been working with the San Francisco planning department and the Frank Lloyd Wright building Conservancy the Maine Frank Lloyd Wright organization to try to ensure that the interior as well as the exterior is fully protected and preserved well finally I'm gonna say something more about Wright's amazing design for a bridge across the San Francisco Bay following World War two there were calls to build a second bridge from San Francisco to Oakland to accommodate increased traffic this was of course before the BART tunnel was proposed and a structural engineer who lived in Berkeley Yaroslav Polivka who had worked with Wright on a couple of his earlier projects suggested that Wright produce a design for this bridge which he did in 1949 it was a really unprecedented design mostly consisting of precast concrete sections that reminded Wright of butterfly wings so he called it the butterfly bridge but the most dramatic part was the central section with two arches spanning 1,000 feet which we see in the upper drawing there which reportedly would have been the longest concrete bridge span at that time the the two arches separating at the center this was the the unusual perhaps most unusual feature about this design these are just separated in the center and supported a suspended landscape Park in coops again I'm advancing when I don't mean to here's the central part of the bridge and you can see how the the roadway splits here and so there are two arches and then the idea was the one could pull pull off into this the landscape Park and enjoy the views from from above and you can even see part of this Park that's up in that drawing a really amazing and kind of crazy idea maybe but certainly something that never been done before well right and Polivka promoted the design and received a lot of favorable attention and publicity and here's that article that we saw before from the San Francisco call newspaper and there's a includes a map showing where this was to be this is the the existing paper and this is where rights does a design was to be running from just about the end of Army Street over to Alameda but the state agency in charge of such projects rejected the design as being too radical and untested nevertheless Wright continued to promote it over the next several years and in 1953 he constructed an impressive model of the central section which he presented at a large public event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art which at that time was in the War Memorial veterans building at the in the Civic Center the the model then stayed there and was seen by many more people including groups of schoolchildren as we can see here then the model was exhibited in other places in the San Francisco area such as the emporium department store and in this photograph we see this is air in green but this is George Christopher mayor Mayor Christopher who was a big supporter of this project and then exhibited at the stones town shopping center and here's here we see it at Stone stone we'll write some presentation of the design at the that Civic Center event was widely reported in the press and let me read from the chronicles story about it which gives an idea of the enthusiasm the public had for Wright's works and also gives an idea of the exuberant and dramatic flair that Wright himself had in in promoting these projects I'll just show one another view that where we see the the model as well as there as that drawing which was also on exhibit at this event in the in the Civic Center 1953 well here's the here's part of the article that was in The Chronicle about this event quote Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled a model of his butterfly bridge for the San Francisco Bay last night with a flight of rhetoric as soaring as the bridges great arches he said here is your bridge steel the sinews buried in the flesh creet he's describing reinforced concrete there a bridge for all time no upkeep ever needed the the aw and then going back to the root of the article the the audience the jammed the San Francisco Museum of Art to see and touch the 16-foot model of the bridge was appropriately uplifted the 535 seats in the main auditorium were sold out another 500 listeners applauded Wright's words in an overflow gallery and an estimated 500 more sprawled on the marble floors with their ears cocked two amplifiers Wright called his bridge this concatenation this wedding of two materials an eternal bridge in which the water becomes with the bridge a great element of beauty we can't go on building bridges that are the equivalent of poles and wires he's referring to truss bridges and and suspension bridges which he thought this would be a better type of bridge and above all we can't have this obstreperous interference in the name of science into the realm of beauty he's talking about the state engineers who rejected his design mopping his brow with an enormous handkerchief Wright said you are citizens all of you aren't you divorced the bridge from politics stop worrying about Oakland get out and build it yourselves he was a real showman by the way that reference to Oakland was because Wright's design for this butterfly bridge had been received very enthusiastically in San Francisco but a different sight for for the bridge was favored in the East Bay for various reasons well in more recent years Wright's butterfly bridge has been repurposed on several occasions for example after the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 when the famous bridge designer T while in examined the design of Wright's design and said he thought it structurally feasible and Jerry Brown when he was mayor of Oakland said it's a fantastic design if we had this bridge leading into Oakland it would be a major boon people from all over the world would come to drive across it so by then it was appreciated in Oakland to like so many of Wright's buildings and projects this bridge looks as as advanced and amazing today I think as when it was proposed more than 50 years ago and even longer ago in the case of other designs of Rights for example his Sea Cliff House for the Morrises more than 70 years ago or his radical hexagonal house for the Hana's at Stanford 80 years ago or his call building skyscraper for Market Street more than 100 years ago well I hope I've been able to suggest the really remarkable qualities and diversity of Rights Bay Area works and some of the fascinating aspects of his relationship with San Francisco thank you [Applause]

Channel: San Francisco Public Library

Views: 14,800

Rating: 4.9390864 out of 5

Keywords: sfpl, san francisco public library, san francisco, sfpl.org, frank lloyd wright, architecture, design, paul turner, paul v turner

Id: 1MSfATZ2t3E

Length: 56min 43sec (3403 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 07 2016