A very special brick

Good, easygoing day today. Finished my paper comparing the architectural spaces, although I still need to sketch an image of the law library. In studio, I took pictures of my model. I'm really impresed with how it turned out and it still surprises me by the way sunlight hits it. Our "interim" project is pretty fun: we're photographing our models. First a series of plain elevations, then some "sexier" shots with interesting angles, details, connections, lighting, etc. The last part is the creation of a photomontage to see what further ideas can be pulled out.

When I came in to work at the library today, I found Jen working with white gloves on at the reserved collections room. The architecture library has absolutely tons of original material concerning the Arizona Biltmore, photos, menus, preliminary sketches, original correspondance between the architect Albert McArthur and Frank Lloyd Wright. Among more intersting items in the collection was a brick from the construction which had been carefully wrapped for preservation purposes. Jen was doing a report on the Biltmore for her interior design history class, and what she found when I told her about the library collection was so in depth and interesting, she kept reseraching and reading far beyond what she needed.

The interest comes from the dynamism between Albert McArthur, a student under Wright for two years, and Mr. Wright himself. Of Wright's proteges, only McArthur really suceeded independnatly. A controversy which has never been adequately closed is how much of the Biltmore did Wright actually design, and most of the material in the collection centers on this.

Basically, McArthur's enterprising brothers financed a massive resort in phoenix, and wanted him to design it. McArthur was up to the task but wanted to use a concrete block bulding system developed by Wright. He wrote Wright to ask if he could use the system. We have Wright's written response, in which he essentially invited himself over to "possiblly asist and supervise." Other documents we found talked about Wright's financial and design crisis just prior, when he was threatened with losing Taliesin, and he had been out of work for awhile. A few years before this, Wright's own prized resort, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, had just been destroyed, and I wonder if he saw this as a second chance, even if only subconsciously.
Wright claimed he had a patent on the building system and charged McArthur a good sum of money for the use of it. About the time when the resort opened, it became clear that Wright had never filed any kind of patent for it at all. In the time between this, Wright moved his family to Phoenix and, according to his wife's book, made a lot of sketches, drawings, and design decisions about the hotel. We do see these sketches in her book, but not in the collection, and we dont know if these were sketches he made based on McArthur's plans, or if it went the other way around. We have a written affadavit, signed by Wright, that he had nothing to do with the Hotel's design, but the nature of the note seems somewhat amiss.
McArthur, for that matter, never liked Wright that much (he only spent 2 years as a fellow), and though he took a lot from his designs and style, they seemed to be at odds, as the patent episode demonstrates. To make a long story short(er), The hotel, which had Wright's trademark style, opened to great fanfare and accolades. All of a sudden, Wright wasn't so eager to dispell the idea that he'd had nothing to do with it's construction. He contradicts himself in several places and never makes a really clear stand. To me, it seems like the classic Mentor-Mentee relationship at its ultimate culmination: the mentor views the mentee as not having what it really takes, and the mentee seeing himself as equal to the mentor.

The mentee in question, Albert McArthur, was a really brilliant guy. We have his detailed and immacualte notes, equations, and essays. He studied quantum and light physics in college, where he developed an independant color theory which he continued to develop and exploit for the rest of his career. His color theroy is really interesting as he associates and compares colors to musical notes. The brightest, most intense colors occur at certain wavelengths, i.e. octives of music, and he actually derived the trademark shape of the masonry block at the Biltmore from a musical composition which was converted first to color, then into sculpture. It's really interesting to see the his handwritten notes firsthand, and peice these things togather yourself. It's an adventure, a mystery. There's enough material here to develop a thesis on it.

In more mundane news, I need a haircut.