The Journal Times Online - Racine, Wisconsin

Text and photos (c) Mark Hertzberg

    Once upon a time, there was an architect. He was actually both an architect, whose innovations shaped where we live and work today, and a philosopher. He was both revered and reviled in his time. A cult grew up around his legacy decades after he died.  Many of his clients have died. Their homes have passed on to umpteen owners, who are besieged with visitors, as people travel far and wide to see the hundreds of buildings he designed.

    The theme of this year’s Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy conference was Frank Lloyd Wright - From Private to Public.  Conferees were challenged to explore the transition in Wright’s homes from private residences to tour destinations, house museums, and even overnight guest houses during Thursday’s morning’s opening panel discussion and evening keynote address. 

    Indeed, the conference theme came alive, because more than a dozen private homes made that very transition, as 200 people toured and photographed them during the conference.

    There is more to opening a Wright site to the public than simply posting visiting hours, setting up a gift shop, and waiting for the tour buses to show up. The venture must be economically viable, especially given the cost of restoring and maintaining Wright’s work.

    The Conservancy’s members either own, or work at, Wright homes and public sites, or else they are The Faithful, Frank Fans who travel from one Wright site to another and keep the cash registers jingling (one former public site manager called them “Frankensteins” in a conversation we had two years ago). The Conservancy has about 1500 members from around the world. Judging from attendance at the conference, and our tours of various sites, they are likely to be Caucasian.  Given the cost of the conference, they have disposable income.

    The panel discussion gave us the most memorable words of the conference. It was a line that that drew peals of laughter, but it was not a throwaway line. It came in a context that underscored the challenges facing site managers. You will have to keep reading, because I am not going to give that line away yet. Consider it dessert; you’ll have to drink your milk, and eat your vegetables, first! I will present the summary of the morning in chronological order of the speakers.

    First, John Harwood from Oberlin College provided context for the panel, when he spoke about the school’s Weltzheimer/Johnson House (1948). “The ability to expose the house as a residence, to be able to dwell there, is a key to understanding (the house).” Harwood said there are many suggestions about how the house should best be used.  “Wright decided to include a piano in the living room, because it helped define the house. The house is a canvas to paint a new picture of the arts at Oberlin.” 

    Students sometimes hold recitals there or use it as a study center. Docents sometimes stay overnight. There have also been suggestions to transform the house into Frank Lloyd Wright research center. However, as T. Gunny Harboe, one of the panelists noted later, “What is interesting about the Oberlin experiment, what is unusual, is that they have the safety net of the college (which owns it).”

    The other panelists were Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning (what magnificent words to add to one’s job description!) architecture critic; Prof. David Longstreth from George Washington University; and Lynda Waggoner, Director of Fallingwater. The moderator was the affable Prof. Jack Quinan from the State University of New York at Buffalo, renowned as an expert on the Larkin Building and the Darwin D. Martin House.


    Quinan started the discussion with statistics:
       
    -24% of Wright buildings are publicly accessible.
    -The number of Wright house museums has doubled in 13 years.
    -There has been a 15% decline in attendance at leading attractions nationwide, including Fallingwater, Taliesin West, and the Home and Studio, since 9/11.
   
    Then he asked,
        “Is every Wright design of museum status?”
        “Is every one viable, from financial considerations?”
        “Given that visitation is down nationally at historic sites, and public house museums struggle financially, what can be done to improve the situation? What can we do?”

    Longstreth noted that the Society of Architectural Historians hesitated before accepting the gift of the Sullivan/Wright-designed Charnley House. It was not a decision made lightly. “We are not in the properties business, we are a scholarly organization. We looked at this gift twelve years ago with a great deal of caution. Holding a great house is not part of our mission, and could seriously detract from our mission.” SAH decided to accept the house. “It costs less to operate out of Charnley than to rent comparable office space.”


    Waggoner, who will host next year’s Conservancy conference, spoke next. Her perspective about Wright visits was from the business side. She said that Fallingwater has had a high of 144,000 annual visitors, “which is almost too many.”  She continued, “If 900 people tour Fallingwater, that is 14 every six minutes.”  Surveys are important marketing tours at Fallingwater.  “Too often we think of what we do as a public service, not as a business.”  Twenty-seven percent of their visitors come because of Frank Lloyd Wright. “That is 40,000 a year, a potential audience for all (Wright) sites.”

    Quinan asked, “How can we get more?” and Kamin quipped, “Another PBS special about Frank Lloyd Wright, narrated by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.” (Jolie arranged for a private tour of Fallingwater for Pitt as a birthday gift, and the gift became highly publicized in the press and on the Internet). Kamin continued in a more serious vein, “One way to engage the public is to improve the experience of going through the houses. How do you make architecture accessible, without dumbing it down? (Wright houses) are designed to be interacted with.” 

    Wright’s clients felt the breeze and saw the sun, he said, “That is difficult to do when buzzing through with 15 people. These new ways of experiencing Wright...smaller groups, overnight stays...Until I stayed in the Price Tower I always had a fantasy of experiencing a night with Wright.”  There was an annoying noise from the elevator. “It was the classic Wright experience...sublime and maddening at the same time.” [The problem with the elevator, “an old-fashioned, clanking monster that made a sound that was far out of proportion to its actual dimensions, which were approximately those of a telephone booth,” has since been fixed, Kamin wrote me after the conference].

    He challenged Wright sites to humanize Wright, rather than idolize him. “Create docent standards that forbid the use of these two words: ‘Mr. Wright.’ I am sick of going to the Home and Studio and hearing of this demigod. My God, he was a deadbeat, a womanizer, an SOB, but he’s talked about like a god. Maybe it’s a strategy to get you to go to the gift shop to buy these icons!

    “(There is) tension between myth and reality. House tours are often conducted by docents who give you about one minute outside the house, and then you go right in. For many of your visitors, they are not in your club, they have not drank your Cherokee red Kool-Aid! [Dear Reader: This was the line you were waiting for, in case you glossed over it] Not only don’t they know anything about Wright, they may not know anything about new urbanism.”

    He urged docents to also talk about “the interaction of the house on the site, whether on a street, on a ravine, on a mountain site. It’s about architecture. We don’t want to just look at these things as objects, precious objects. All of this stuff will enrich the experience.”

    Harboe, who is involved in the restoration of Unity Temple, picked up the discussion. “Many smaller (sites) depend on visitation for revenue, but will not survive on (that).” The key, he said, is to “look at not only increasing visitation, but also increasing the visitor experience:

    -Word of mouth will help increase visitation.
    -You can suffer from success [if the tours are too crowded]
    -Every site is different.  What makes sense for that site?
    -Interaction with your community:  use that resource

    “Reverence for Wright is well intended,” he continued,  “But if only 27% of the visitors at Fallingwater go because of Wright, why are the others going? Wright may be the hook, but what is there that is meaningful get them to come back or go elsewhere?”

    Quinan asked, “Is the docent-led tour a relic of the past?”  Waggoner brought us back to Fallingwater,  where visitors have only six minutes per room, “with 14 people right behind you.”  Fallingwater is an icon. “For other houses,” Waggoner said,  “Find the niche you can serve.
   
    “I realize, Blair, what you say about canonizing Wright.  If you open up that can of worms you can go downhill.  They [visitors] are irretrievable.  There are lots of places you can study Frank Lloyd Wright, but you can only go to that house. Our goal is just to facilitate that experience.”

    Waggoner continued to emphasize the business side of Wright tourism. “When you reduce numbers (such as by going from 143,000 visitors a year to 123,000), you reduce revenue. You have a payroll of 125 people you have to meet every two weeks. [The challenge is] how to bring in more revenue with less impact on the house.” Fallingwater has expanded its menu of tours, including in-depth tours, brunch tours, sunset tours ($125), and focus tours (with lunch on the terrace). “There is a huge audience, like it or not, people with a great deal of wealth, who want experiences other people can’t have. I am happy to let them do that, to pay for 2,000 school children to visit.”

    Then, as an aside, she talked about what makes a good docent. Docents who can adapt to the background and interests of each tour group are more valued than ones who have a boilerplate talk that never changes. “The skill I look for most in a guide is goofy enthusiasm.”

    Prof. Longstreth returned to the idolization of Wright. “When I hear ‘Mr. Wright,’ I’m immediately suspect, but on the other hand, every time I get back to Wright, I am bowled over by what he accomplished; and also the clients. Most Wright clients, even if they weren't rich and famous, are interesting.  All of these places have great stories, and they are particular stories.  95% of these house museums, the box office doesn’t make it. You need alternate income if you’re going to make it. Think creatively. [Think of] uses sympathetic with what you have which is very fragile in many respects. Oberlin (the Weltzheimer/Johnson House), it is a privilege to be there. Build up an alumni support group. They are thinking creatively in a variety of ways.  Make these living properties in many ways, not like zoos of old, where you look at living things through bars.

    Kamin jumped back into the discussion. “Wright and the contrast between myth and reality...I’m not saying you should do People magazine as you do the tour, but it is worth riding the wave. Who better than Wright to hook people in? It is the ultimate story, if done in an intelligent way, in which docents tell stories about his character, who he was, how he acted with his clients. This can enrich the experience. This is a Golden Age for historical properties.” Then he seemed to challenge Waggoner, “Stop thinking of visitors, start thinking of members, not ‘them,’ but ‘us.’”

    Harboe told how his architectural career started, when he elaborated on his observation that “the status quo is not working. We need to find new and creative ways to use these properties. When you make a conversion from a house to a publicly visited entity, physical intervention is required. Don’t do it lightly.

    “It would be great if you could sit in the furniture in some of these houses.” He took the audience back to the Little House living room installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “I was a carpenter on the Little House. It made me want to go to architecture school. It was a transformational moment when we were done. We popped a beer, and sat on the couch in the living room, which we were not supposed to do. It was an incredible experience which everyone should be able to do! Overnight stays, those uses have lots of potential.

    Joan Mercuri from the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust suggested, from the audience, that docents ask visitors, “What do you want... and not just repeat what they know.”  A homeowner chimed in, “They come with their stories of Wright, they want to see the leaky roof.”  And, Lynda Waggoner, “If you have a repertoire of ten different tours they can give, they have to create a tour that fits them, even people who don’t know why they are there.  A really good guide has to be able to adjust to the group, and read the group.”

    Conference co-chair John Thorpe ended the session, “I’m proud that we talked about the future, and not just the past.”  Then, it was tour time for the conferees, as we scooped up our box lunches and clambered aboard four motor coaches, named ABS, Erdman, Prairie, and Usonian, to see Wright’s work in Riverside. We toured the Avery Coonley House, Coach House, and Playhouse, and saw the Tomek House, before the evening program at Unity Temple.  That was followed by a benefit reception at the Heurtley House.

    Dean and Ella Mae Eastman have done an extraordinary job, fulfilling the Conservancy’s mission, saving the Avery Coonley House and the Coach House.










The Avery Coonley Playhouse, which is known by so many people because of its festive clerestory windows, is in good hands, as well. There was a note of discord at the Playhouse, as we learned that one of the conferees did not respect the owners’ wishes to not photograph the interior, and repeatedly tried to shoot a photo through the door, into the house.  It was a treat for me to see the Tomek House, because of some similarities to the Hardy House, which I have researched and published a book about.

 The approach to the Tomek House:

   

      Then it was on to Unity Temple for a reception, before Sidney Robinson’s speech.

The walls of Unity House were filled with delightful photographs taken at Wright sites by young people. The exhibit, “The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright through the Eyes of a Child” is sponsored by the Burton Westcott House, Fallingwater, and Unity Temple Restoration Foundation, under the auspices of Eyes Wide Open Worldwide.


   


     First, I have to note that I looked at Unity Temple differently, as I listened to Robinson’s talk, than I have before, walking in as a Wright tourist. I noticed, first, how the trim took me around the hall. Then I wondered what it must have been like to be part of the first service a century ago, either in the pulpit or in the congregation. Did everyone realize that they were part of something special?  How many skeptics were there, people who might have preferred a more traditional church building?  What did everyone tell friends, family, and work colleagues about the experience?




     Robinson, a professor at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, reiterated the theme of his talk near the end, “The question is how to deal with architecture when it had one function, and now it has switched to another.”  I will quote liberally from Robinson’s address, rather than paraphrase and try to interpret it for you.

      Robinson noted that we were in Wright’s commission which has been in longer continuous use than any other. He asked, “What does it mean to have architecture play the role of touristic architecture?”  The process entails having to take “the ordinary and everyday, and make it significant,” he said. “The relation between architecture and tourism is more difficult because Wright believed in democracy for everyone. Wright tried to make architecture available to anybody, like a book is available for anyone. Architecture is for anyone who wanted it.”

    He turned to private homes. “The house as a special event, rather than an inhabitation is one of the special challenges...the idea of lifting up the ordinary into something special is a problem.  Protecting the artifact as it is consumed, is a particular problem for architecture.
Reading a poem does not put it at risk, but inhabiting affects the habitation. Being in it...degrades the building physically, but that is where spirit lives.

    “The touristic experience cannot help but be different than inhabiting.  Can we bridge that gap? How long do you have to be in a place to actually be in it?  Is a weekend enough? Do you have to live a whole life in it?  [This is] an impossible question to answer. How long is long enough to be in a house?”

    He then addressed the question of the context of the building, noting that “the site of Unity Temple, on one level includes the [Gothic] church across the street.”  He said that Olgivanna Wright cried on a visit to Fallingwater, because it was not being lived in.

    Robinson then brought us back to John Harwood’s morning talk about the Weltzheimer/Johnson House saying it shows the “range of possibilities of what architecture can do, how it can have significance beyond the drinkers of Kool-Aid.

    “When [we] live in [a house], [when it is] part of ongoing daily life...the seasons change, life patterns change...the inhabitant moves forward, sometimes back...sometimes it affects you, sometimes it is annoying.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said that when the king is in the house, no one looks at the walls. Architecture is just the foreground. Architecture is not constant, it is evolving. Making a building something special is a very strange way to think about a building. It divorces it from life. If there is anything Frank Lloyd Wright architecture is, it is about life.
 
    He concluded, “The business of being in a Frank Lloyd Wright building is an ongoing evolution, a spiritual change.”

    I am delighted that so many people said that the following day, the conference day in Racine, which I helped arrange, was the highlight, but I was busy working on the conference, so there are no photos or reports from that day. You will have to depend on our friends at PrairieMod for that report. My third and final report will include photos from house tours in Glencoe. It will not be posted for at least a week.