frank lloyd wright — thoughts

I just visited the Houses of Tomorrow: Solar Homes from Keck to Today exhibit at the Elmhurst Art Museum. Throughout my 3 years of graduate architecture school, I never heard of George Fred Keck, nor his brother, William. Maybe I just didn’t listen closely enough, but I think I was a pretty good student (hi mom). But anyway, I get excited any time I get to learn about a new architect, so it was a fun!

The Keck brothers were ahead of their time in technology. They are known as the first “solar architects,” harnessing the power of the sun to help passively condition indoor spaces. The principle is simple, but the execution is hard. The idea is that you want to let the sun inside during the colder months (to heat up the space) and keep the sun outside during the hotter months (make it easier on your cooling system - air conditioning or natural ventilation).

Passive Solar Orientation
Photo by Curt MacIver, Taken at Elmhurst Art Museum, Artist Unknown

The Keck brothers showed off their innovative, all-glass House of Tomorrow at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. It was a huge hit. The design was radical, and the new technology excited everyone for the amenable and luxurious domestic life to come. Initially, the attached garage was a hangar for a private airplane!

(The house was eventually moved to the Indiana lakeshore, where it is currently seeking a buyer to finance a multi-million dollar renovation plan in exchange for a 50-year lease. Anyone interested? Get it while it’s hot! Sorry, solar AND housing market joke in one.)

The second half of the gallery looked at the many private homes that the Keck brothers designed throughout their career. Mostly mid-century in style, they marketed their utility-bill-saving homes as both a financial and cultural investment. One of their larger homes was crescent shape (following the path of the sun), with the driveway running along side the interior curve. The scale and approach looked as though it could be a two-star hotel. But, most of the other homes were really beautiful - well-proportioned with nice outdoor space and fun brise-soleils.

George Fred Keck’s Crystal House was a different exploration. Its exposed exterior steel trusses no doubt influenced the future generation of high-tech architecture.

George Fred Keck's Crystal Home
Photo by Curt MacIver, Taken at Elmhurst Art Museum, Courtesy of Hedrich Blessing Studio

The curators speculate on how Keck also influenced his contemporaries. The exhibit explicitly pointed out parallels between George Fred Keck and Frank Lloyd Wright - the first being that they both have three names. No, but, FLW would eventually also design a crescent-shaped house - semi-similar in plan and function.

The exhibit remarks on emerging technologies (solar panels, high-performance windows, geothermal heat pumps, energy recovery ventilators, etc.) and current programs (LEED, PHIUS) that help the built environment limit its impact on the environment. It really is an exciting time to be a designer. It’s a challenging time but exciting time. There are so many tools and resources at your disposal.

The funny thing about the exhibit is that part of the associated art installation by Jan Tichy is housed in the adjacent building of the museum, which is Mies van der Rohe’s 1952 McCormick House. As I learned while studying in Crown Hall for multiples years, Mies’s design philosophy prioritizes design aesthetic and function, not (thermal) comfort. This discussion is worthy of an entire book, but it was an interesting - unintentionally entertaining - contrast to the museum’s exhibit.

This was my first visit to the museum, and I was pleasantly surprised. The building is really pretty, and the exhibit was well curated. It’s sad to see that these passive energy approaches have been around for almost 100 years in contemporary buildings, and they still don’t seem to be widely used. Why are net-zero energy buildings so sexy? Shouldn’t they be the status quo? Hopefully soon.

This past weekend, I went to Wrightwood 659’s Romanticism to Ruin: Two Lost Works of Sullivan & Wright. In a truly serendipitous fashion, this exhibit works really well with last week’s post. It’s a similar theme of temporary vs permanent architecture but shed in a different light. Let’s dive in.

Dank Adler & Louis Sullivan (Adler & Sullivan) and Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) designed buildings that were seemingly permanent. (FLW was actually working for Adler & Sullivan in the time of Schiller, but that’s for a different history lesson). The respective clients had every intention, at the beginning, to build something that would stand the test of time. Schiller Building was a beautiful auditorium with offices above, breaking the ceiling of what a skyscraper should look like (height joke). The Larkin Building emerged with innovative building technology and reimagined interior office environment, including a new-to-the-time open floor plan. But in short, both buildings met the same fate with a wrecking ball. The permanent quickly became temporary. (Larkin was replaced by a surface parking lot, which is twist of the knife).

Both of these buildings mark a sad time in preservation history. Activists weren’t able to sway the decisions of the city nor private developers. However, the seemingly guilted retrospection of the Schiller Building did lead to a preservation movement here in Chicago that is still active, and successful, today (yay Thompson Center!).

With all of that said, I want to examine how this exhibit, in particular, has brought the buildings back into the permanent realm, after they had both been prematurely stripped of that identity, over 60 years ago. What are the tools that resurrected the Schiller and Larkin buildings’ permanence?

Documentation

The Schiller Building is a unique example of this because the city allowed a small team to document ‘existing conditions’ before the building was torn down. Extensive notes and photos documenting color, texture, material, etc all funnel into a fascinating, albeit sad, story of the dismantling process. The Larkin Building is a different tale. Photos of the finished product, both exterior and interior, circulate the architecture community, but not much was documented for the actual demolition. But nonetheless, all of this documentation becomes permanent, which breathes new life into the legacy of these buildings. (I’ll save you the philosophical debate of what these images represent and whether they themselves are a different entity of permanence)

Primary Sources

In the exhibit, original sketches, architectural details, and engineering drawings are displayed. As a 21st century draftsman (read: I use a computer), I am completely in awe of the craft behind these drawings. Every single drawing is a work of art. But I digress…. These drawings, like documentation, are permanent! Even if the building itself is not there anymore, these drawings communicate important design ideas and spatial details, at times better than what I think they would be in person.

Contemporary Fabrication

With the help of documentation and research (maybe those are one in the same), students and professionals were able to create replicas of various details from the Schiller Building. A full scale replica of some of the ornamental friezes (lights and colors included!) hung on the walls. A beautiful scale model of the entire Schiller building allows the temporary to become permanent (although, I am not sure of the future of the model). The interior space was 3D modeled, allowing for rendered fly through of the space. It was a great way to allow people to place themselves in the space, but I do wonder if their imagination could have done that for them. But, I think I am biased since I work and think that way all day long.

The exhibit was a great example of how to celebrate and honor a building’s legacy, even if the structure itself is not here anymore. It also highlights the importance of documentation and research. The Schiller portion of the exhibit was exhaustive (in a good way). The Larkin portion was lacking (they told more of the tale of the company than the building), but I imagine that’s just due to lack of resources. In short, recognizing the history of architecture (and how it is communicated!) is an important part of our architecture dialogue. With that foundation, then, we can start to understand how it impacts our present and future projects.