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Wright in Racine
February 2008
Tuesday February 5, 2008
Posted by: mhertzberg at 2:36PM CST on February 5, 2008
Text and photos (c) Mark Hertzberg Tim Sakamoto can take you to every nook and cranny of Fallingwater, Taliesin, and Taliesin West. He can also give you a tour of striking buildings by such architects as Zaha Hadid, Richard Schindler, Morphosis, Eric Owen Moss, and Will Bruder. You can take these tours, and more, without ever leaving home, through his Planet Architecture CD-ROM and DVD discs. Sakamoto, who has a degree in architecture from Berkley, turned from designing homes, to audio visual productions, early in his career. His company is In-D Press. His first discs, from the late 1990s, were interactive CD-Roms; more recent titles are DVDs.
“Fallingwater” was published in 2005. It is available in a two-disc set. The first disc includes a rich history of this iconic Wright commission, with many historic photos. There are also extended interviews with Lynda Waggoner, the director of Fallingwater, and with Richard Cleary, an architectural historian. Waggoner spoke at the recent Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy national meeting about her almost life-long involvement with, and love of, the house. Her enthusiasm for her work is contagious, as she takes us on tour, and talks about the house and its history. Her tour is a good precursor to one’s first visit to Fallingwater (the 2008 Conservancy meeting will be at Fallingwater, in September). Talking about E.J. Kaufmann and Wright, who sometimes clashed while the house was being built, she says, “They were similar people. They were both big thinkers, men who liked to make things happen, men who had great vision. What held them together was this shared vision of creating something extraordinary...You don’t have to be very knowledgeable about architecture to have the building speak to you personally.” She paints vivid word pictures for us (“Suddenly nature is presented to you at the level of a bug. Wright had this unique ability to present nature to us.”). She ends her interview telling us, “A masterpiece is something that has a timelessness about it...I think Fallingwater is doing well over the test of time...” Cleary has a more academic view of the house. Their intimate knowledge of Fallingwater is woven with Sakamoto’s photography, which takes us to places we cannot go in person. The camera is just to our right during the interviews. Cleary and Waggoner tend to look at the camera, rather than at the viewer. We would be drawn into the story of the house even more if they engaged us directly during their interviews. The second disc of the set is an interactive visual tour of Fallingwater, including panoramic views of exterior of the house, and of the grounds. The disc includes copies of original plans and presentation drawings, as well as dozens of contemporary photos.  I met Sakamoto when he was in Racine to tour the SC Johnson Administration Building (1936) almost a year ago. He had come to Oak Park for the annual Wright Plus tour, with his family. They had popped up to Racine for one of the weekly Friday tours of the Johnson building. I was at the Golden Rondelle, where tours start, when I saw a man with professional photographic equipment, and struck up a conversation.
Sakamoto says he has a “critical” way of looking at buildings. He comes away “appreciating what it does successfully,” while also examining “the deficiencies which are often overlooked in history books.” He reflects on his visit to Racine, “I think overall, I was very impressed with the Great Workroom, but being an architect (I like) to look at buildings in a way they are not normally photographed, looking for ways in which the building does not function the way it is supposed to function. 
The Great Workroom He had hoped to tour the companion Research Tower (1944). “After seeing how small it actually is, I understand why they can’t allow groups inside. (An earlier article on this site presents a tour of the interior of the Tower). The link is: Sakamoto grew up in Los Angeles. He did not grow up with an awareness of Wright, even though some of his most important commissions were nearby. Sakamoto says he wanted to be a residential architect after living in single family homes his whole life. Architecture does not have to be significant to affect people. Sakamoto describes the house he grew up in as “just a typical suburban tract house, in an older subdivision.” The house itself may not have been remarkable, but it made an impression on him. “It wasn’t the style or character of the house that I grew up in, but seeing the possibilities that single family homes offered, that persuaded me to pursue architecture as a living.” He became a multi-media producer, as he explored ways to teach others about architecture. “I would consider myself more than an educator than a filmmaker or an AV producer. My interest in architecture drove me to use the digital media as a way to explore, understand, and teach architecture to a larger public. It came out of my own interest in architecture, and wanting to see different kinds of architecture that wouldn’t be possible working in a traditional office environment, and then working out a business model to make that happen. “It’s amazing. When you have a camera, people want to talk to you. If you ask them, ‘Can I look at your office, or go into your buildings’ (without a camera), people say ‘no.’ He published his first title, “Vol. 1 Recent Houses” in 1999. He distributes the discs to museums and architectural bookstores.
Sakamoto's first disc was a CD-ROM He hired an architectural photographer for the first discs. Then he started doing his own photography out of a passion for the craft, as well as to cut his production costs. He uses tilt shift lenses, which help eliminate visual distortion in architectural photography. The panoramic photos are shot with a fisheye lens, and then “stitched together” with computer software. Sakamoto’s interest in photography coincided with the growth of digital photography. “I could take lots of pictures, and select only the best, which is not economical to do with film.” Sakamoto first learned about Wright at Berkley. “My impressions of Wright weren’t all that great, even through all my years in school. My perception of him was that his ideals or style of architecture had passed, and new contemporary architecture was more interesting.” Notable contemporary architects that he remembers from school include Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, and Morphosis. His awareness of Wright’s work came later. “It wasn't until I started visiting some of those buildings that I started to see and appreciate what he was doing and the kind of value it could have today.” He visited Taliesin West, when he was in Phoenix working on one of his first discs, a study of Will Bruder’s work. Then he visited Hollyhock and the Ennis - Brown House in Los Angeles. “I think my most significant (realization) was the sheer imagination and creativity that he was able to bring together, different local materials and building methods to create a new kind of desert living environment. “They were moments that kind of build over time, the first hour of the tour, then walking around some more, then visiting another time. I absorb things over time, and through the many visits there absorbed the many nuances of his architecture and his ideas.” That first visit to Scottsdale led to discs about Taliesin West and Taliesin. He estimates that he has visited Taliesin West 20 times. Sakamoto is now working with the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust to produce a similar tour of the Home and Studio in Oak Park. The anticipated release is in May. LINKS: |
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