Summer is a great time to visit botanical gardens. It's the best time to enjoy lush green foliage, flower in full bloom and of course, bask in special exhibits. This was especially true of the Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Columbus, OH where in the Pacific Island Water Garden colorful Central American butterflies… Continue reading Chihuly at Franklin Park Conservatory
Cincinnati is called The Queen City or The Queen of the West due to its spectacular growth in the 19th century as industrialists and entrepreneurial adventurers sought out opportunities along the banks of the mighty Ohio River. Among the many that came was Alphonso Taft, who made the move from Vermont in 1838 to establish… Continue reading A Day in Cincinatti
Seated at the busy intersection of Lake St and N. Kenilworth Ave, Unity Temple is considered by many as the first modern building in the world. In great contrast to the stone churches being at time with a central nave and bell-tower, Frank Lloyd Wright designed for his own Unitarian congregation a boxy Prairie School style… Continue reading The Wright Houses – Unity Temple
I call 2017 my year of Wright for in November I had the opportunity to head out to Chicago to where it all began - 951 Chicago Avenue in Oak Park, Illinois. Frank Lloyd Wright purchased the property and built the home in 1889 with a $5,000 loan from his employer Louis Sullivan. It was to be… Continue reading The Wright Houses – Oak Park Home & Studio
I capped off my weekend Wright trip last April with a stop at Polymath Park, a half-hour drive from Fallingwater. It had snowed the night before and snow still glisten from the tree tops. Driving through the Allegheny Mountains felt like entering upon an enchanted winter wonderland. Little wonder the rich and powerful of Pittsburgh… Continue reading The Wright Houses – Polymath Park
Cushioned into the mountainside of the Chestnut Ridge at 2,050 feet above sea level, Kentuck Knob is barely visible from view. It was one of the last Frank Lloyd Wright houses ever constructed. Wright was 86 when I.N. and Bernardine Hagan, friends of the Kaufmanns, approached him to design for them a luxury Usonian house in 1953… Continue reading The Wright Houses – Kentuck Knob
When Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr. and his wife Liliane commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935 to design a summer house on their sixty-acre woodland retreat in the Allegheny Mountains 70 miles south of Pittsburgh, little did they know the result - Fallingwater - would be an architectural masterpiece, a work of art unlike anything that… Continue reading The Wright Houses – Fallingwater
Some things are so pervasive, so ubiquitous that we almost forget its origin story, that it was actually invented or designed by someone (fairly) recently. Light filled rooms and open floor plans were unheard of until Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 1900s. Electric lights weren't a commonplace sight in homes until the 1930s. Personal… Continue reading Lights Up!
The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, housed on the grounds of a former gas station and photogravure plant, was designed by Noguchi himself and opened to the public in 1985 on a seasonal basis. Born in 1907, Noguchi's artistic career spanned six decades starting in the early 1920s and continuing until his death in 1988. He… Continue reading Artist’s Refuge – Noguchi Museum
From afar it is reminiscent of little house on the pairie - an innocent structure sitting alone in a vast green field on a hilltop. Barely see through, yet undeniably comprised of solid parts, it seems to cut through the temporal fluidity of time and space. Existing another as if on another plane, within sigh… Continue reading Translucence
