Frank Lloyd Wright’s Admirers Fight to Save His Periled Legacy : Architecture: The flamboyant innovator is appreciated now more than ever since his death. But scores of his distinctive buildings have vanished.

Now that he has been placed on equal footing with the Greek firm of Ictinus and Callicrates that designed the Parthenon, a serious effort is under way to save Frank Lloyd Wright’s surviving buildings from being knocked down.

“It’s sinful, sinful,” exclaims Jeanette Fields, looking out the window of her Wright-designed house in nearby River Forest, Ill., watching a group of Japanese tourists who are looking in.

“Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel is gone. The Larkin building in Buffalo was torn down for no sane reason. Chicago’s Midway Gardens went to the wrecker’s ball. And look what they’re doing to the Guggenheim Museum in New York.”

The tourists, she says, come by the bus load, beginning as soon as the sun comes up. They are Frank Lloyd Wright fans, armed with cameras, maps and cassette recorders, hot on the trail of 33 houses and 10 “bootlegs”--moonlighting jobs while working as a draftsman for architect Louis Sullivan--that Wright built between 1889 in 1909 in Oak Park and adjoining River Forest, 10 miles west of Chicago.

Built in 190l, hers is one of the earliest of Wright’s “Prairie School” houses, which still draw admirers from around the world.

Fields, who admits to being “kicked out of several dinner parties for getting very emotional about people selling off Wright windows and woodwork,” is a director of the recently formed Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.

The conservancy is a consortium of Wright homeowners, curators of Wright house museums, architects, and preservationists. It is the latest manifestation of growing public concern about preserving the surviving 347 buildings designed by Wright in a career that spanned seven decades.

Sixty-seven buildings already have vanished and many others are seriously deteriorating. They are under threat from urban sprawl and developers, or prey to scavengers in the booming market for Wright artifacts such as art glass windows and decorative woodwork.

Preserving what’s left is no easy task, concedes Oak Park architect John Thorpe, who has had a hand in restoring 21 Frank Lloyd Wright houses.

“If the building is in really decrepit condition, you’re going to pay a lot more for restoration than you did for the property,” he says. “That’s why cannibalism is so lethal to our efforts. The temptation is to sell off one or two windows, which can bring $250,000 or so on the art market, to pay off the restoration.

“Fortunately, the people who buy and live in these houses today are not unlike the special brand of thinking clients who were the original owners and had faith in Wright’s off-beat ideas. They know what’s different about these houses: the natural light, the feeling of shelter, the openness, the sheer comfort.”

“Restoration takes tact. It’s like telling a neighbor to fix up his garage,” says preservationist Frank Pond, who is active in saving Unity Temple, the Unitarian church in Oak Park that was Wright’s first public building.

The church, he says, was built for $40,000. “Our restoration surveys cost more.”

Wright, who died 31 years ago at age 91, is far more appreciated and revered now than at any time in a flamboyant career. The architect, who never lacked self-esteem, was scorned for his having left a wife and six kids to run off with a client’s wife. Then there was the gory murder of his mistress, two of her children and four workmen by a crazed employee.

He was endlessly ducking bill collectors, soothing clients over leaky roofs and cost overruns that sometimes ran into the millions.

“Honest arrogance” was Wright’s justification for treating clients, critics and creditors like unruly children. But the dapper charmer in the porkpie hat, flowing tie and opera cape probably never envisioned that 70,000 tourists a year would troop through his home and studio in Oak Park, which he started with a $5,000 loan and which has just undergone a 12-year, $2.1-million restoration.

“He must be up there chuckling,” says Jeanette Fields, who concedes that her restoration costs were “many, many times over” the price paid by the original owner, E. Arthur Davenport, who worked for the Illinois Central railroad.

The vault of heaven may also echo with chuckles at the recent sale of a Wright dining room table and chairs for $1.6 million and Christie’s auctioning off one of his floor lamps for $704,000 and another lamp, together with an oak music cabinet, for $330,000.

No fewer than 12 Wright houses are now museums, including fabulous Fallingwater, perched over that waterfall in Bear Run, Pa.; the Mayer-May house in Grand Rapids, Mich., refurbished to its original glory in a 2-year, multimillion-dollar restoration, and the Dana-Thomas house in Springfield, Ill., undergoing a $4.6-million restoration funded by the Illinois Legislature.

In Japan, where Wright has had a fanatical following since his first visit in 1903, an outdoor museum near Nagoya has reproduced in authentic scale the facade of his earthquake-proof Imperial Hotel. This daring classic, which he “floated” on pilings sunk in the soft mud bottom and “delicately balanced like a tray on the fingertips of a waiter,” survived the great Tokyo earthquake and fire of 1923 but fell to the wrecker’s ball in 1967.

An agreement has just been reached to reproduce and market Wright’s furniture, which 20 years ago, according to Chicago preservationist Timothy Barton, “you couldn’t get the Salvation Army to cart away.”

His original drawings are valued in the tens of millions of dollars.

And what other architect three decades after his death goes on pleasing clients with his “office tragedies”--buildings that for lack of funds or other reasons never got built in his lifetime? In recent years, some 15 Wright designs have been executed in half a dozen states.

“We frequently get inquiries about his blueprints,” says architect Charles Montooth, who recently erected Wright-designed houses in Ann Arbor and Santa Fe. “Interest in Mr. Wright goes in waves, and each time the peak gets a little higher.

“Until recently people didn’t realize he designed fabrics and furniture. Now galleries and collectors are bidding up his artifacts like Impressionist paintings.”

Montooth is a fellow at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture and a member of Taliesin Associated Architects, the firm that continues his ideas and principles.

Architects still operate out of Wright’s two former headquarters, Taliesin North in Spring Green, Wis., and Taliesin West near Phoenix, Ariz.

“There are problems building from old plans,” says Montooth, leading a guest on a tour of Taliesin North’s sandstone and native oak buildings that seemed to grow out a hillside. “Building codes and client requirements change over the years. Costs go up. A house that could be built for $20,000 in the ‘30s might run you a quarter-million now.

“And Mr. Wright kept changing his ideas as he went along. He was like Thomas Jefferson at Monticello: From day to day he never saw a project the same way.”

Montooth recalls the early days at Taliesin West in Arizona. “It was just a glorified tent, but Mr. Wright, in his 70s then, had to have his grand piano. He loved grand pianos and fast cars. Mr. Wright believed apprentices should learn by building, so we lived in tents while we built in the desert.”

Yamesee Plantation near Charleston, S.C., which was in deplorable decay, is undergoing a multimillion-dollar restoration. In addition outer buildings that Wright designed and never saw built are in the overall plan.

The proprietor is movie producer Joel Silver, who already lives in a Wright house in Hollywood--Storer House, a Pompeiian villa remarkable for having no front door. Wright liked his entrances secluded, mysterious, evoking our primitive ancestors finding shelter in a cave.

But in other areas, preservation of the legacy is far from encouraging, reports Carla Lind, executive director of the Wright Building Conservancy. She and others lament new additions to the Marin County Civic Center north of San Francisco and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Under court pressure to relieve overcrowding, Marin County has planned a new jail that Wright preservationists say would obstruct the view and destroy the ground-hugging grandeur of his quarter-mile-long, pink stucco center that leaps over roads and three small hills in graceful arches. Admirers compare it with Pont du Gard, the Roman aqueduct in Provence.

Erecting the jail, protested Preserve Our Civic Center, an advocacy group, would be “like putting a Taco Bell in front of the Taj Mahal.”

Similar anguished cries resulted in some modification of plans to expand the Guggenheim, Wright’s swirling concrete cone in New York City that has been hailed as his East Coast masterpiece.

Wright fans are still unreconciled by the revised plans.

“They scrapped the first proposal, which was an absolute monstrosity, and came up with a second, which is less monstrous,” said Roland Reisley, secretary of the conservancy. “But from our viewpoint it is a serious loss to the integrity of one of the world’s most glorious spaces.”

Throughout his career Wright never lost interest in low-income housing.

Chicago has given landmark protection to the partly burned-out and deteriorating Waller Apartments, which rented for $12 a month at the turn of the century, and to the abused and neglected 1894 Roloson Buildings, his only row houses.

“Both would cost more to restore than replace, but they cry out for some philanthropic endowment to save them,” says Timothy Barton, a preservation specialist with the Chicago Landmark Commission. “Some of the windows surfaced as recently as two months ago on the art market and are worth more than the property.”

The encouraging news for Wright fans is that a number of museums now refuse to acquire fixtures and furniture scavenged from his surviving buildings.

Conservancy director Lind has not given up hope of rescuing the sadly decaying A. D. German warehouse, an impressive Mayan-style temple in Richland Center, Wis., that Wright created in 1916 for one of his many creditors. Certainly the world’s most bizarre warehouse, it had room to store coal, grain and feed supplies, as well as retail shops, an art gallery and a restaurant.

“Richland Center is Wright’s birthplace, and it would make an appropriate town hall,” she says.