Carving a Niche With Wright Name
Being a third-generation Wright, as in Frank Lloyd, can be both a blessing and a curse. Especially when you’re an architect too, like Eric Lloyd Wright, the legendary architect’s grandson.
“I think it works for me in that it gives me recognition, and people associate me with Frank Lloyd Wright, and I am working in what we call organic architecture, a form of architecture developed by my grandfather, so I am happy to have that recognition,” said Wright, 62, who will give a talk at 7:30 p.m. today at Sherwood Auditorium in La Jolla.
“But, being a grandson, there is a lot of time required of me to give information about Frank Lloyd Wright, which takes a lot of time away from my own work.”
Wright’s talk tonight will cover both sides of his career. He will discuss the architecture of two earlier generations of Wrights, including Frank Lloyd Wright and his sons John Lloyd and Lloyd, Eric’s father. He will explain his involvement supervising the restoration of several of the houses designed by his forebears.
But Eric Wright will also show some of his own projects. He is a respected architect and planner who carries on Frank Lloyd Wright’s “organic” approach to architecture.
Wright has headed his own architectural office in Los Angeles since 1978, when his father died and he took over the practice. He has designed projects ranging from an animal shelter in Ojai to an office building in Glendale and several houses, including one under construction in La Crescenta.
“Some come for the name, but some come because they’ve seen the work I’ve done and liked it,” said Wright, who is soft-spoken, patient and easily likable, qualities seldom attributed to his grandfather.
One of his largest current projects involves master-planning a pair of large residential developments.
“We think he is a very unique fellow,” said Buck Johns, president of the Inland Group, which hired Wright and Taliesin Architects to master-plan a 550-acre development known as Greer Ranch and a nearby 270-acre tract called Murrieta Oaks, both north of Temecula in Riverside County.
“He has had exposure that very few of us can claim to have had. He’s traveled the world and is probably the most knowledgeable guy when it comes to organic architecture and how it impacts the planning process.”
Even so, Wright has found it difficult to step from under his grandfather’s shadow. He is besieged with a steady stream of calls from writers and scholars wanting first-hand information on Frank Lloyd Wright. In recent years, supervising the restoration of several important Frank Lloyd Wright houses consumed much of his time.
Between 1984 and 1988 alone, he was the architect for the restoration of three of Frank Llo yd Wright’s experimental 1920s concrete block houses in Los Angeles: the Ennis, Storer and Millard residences.
Although Wright would appreciate some distance from his grandfather’s towering image, he has genuinely enjoyed the hundreds of hours he has spent examining several Frank Lloyd Wright houses so they could be accurately restored.
“That’s the wonderful thing about the restorations,” said Wright. “Getting to understand more closely what my grandfather was trying to do, to see how these things are put together.
“You also see the effect when the houses were not put together according to the original plans. It’s a detective process. I have to ask, ‘Was that really what Frank Lloyd Wright wanted?”
In many cases, the restorations are actually more authentic than the original houses.
The Storer house in Hollywood is a prime example. It is owned by movie producer Joel Silver (“48 Hours” and the “Die Hard” “Lethal Weapon” series), who lavished millions on a total make-over.
In the cases of several Wright houses including this one, the original owners couldn’t, or didn’t want to, spend the amounts necessary to complete them as designed.
Frank Lloyd Wright was a stickler for detail. He wanted the Storer house to have color canopies over its decks, supported by copper and brass frames. Instead, the original canopies used different colors and were held up by inexpensive galvanized pipe.
Silver wanted everything original, right down to the awnings. One of the major cost items was restoring the patterned, interlocking concrete blocks, a system Frank Lloyd Wright hoped would revolutionize the construction of American homes.
Eric Wright oversaw the casting of several thousand blocks from the original forms. Although the aesthetic impact is grand, he confesses that the system didn’t work as his grandfather had hoped it would.
“Because the blocks were handmade on the job, not all were of uniform size, so they had to start shimming them. And, because they were only 3 1/2 inches thick, they didn’t sit up well.”
Another restoration involved a Frank Lloyd Wright house, also owned by Silver, at Auldbrass Plantation in Yemeesee, S.C.
Completed in 1946, the house had changed hands several times over the years and had suffered inappropriate additions.
It wound up as a clubhouse for a gun club whose members “parked boats in the living room, turned bedrooms into bunk rooms and made the main kitchen into a slaughter room,” Eric Wright said.
Again, the restoration was better than the original. Silver footed the bill, which included original copper roofing and down spouts made in the image of moss hanging from nearby stands of cypress, and steel reinforcing to shore up sagging eaves.
But Eric Wright is as enthusiastic about his own designs, which clearly extend the spirit of his grandfather.
He laid out the new house in La Crescenta to preserve several large old pine and cedar trees. The house is mostly wood frame and stucco, but a vaulted two-story entry will feature a sweeping concrete wall.
And Wright is especially proud of a house he designed for his brother, Rupert, and his wife, writer Anais Nin, in the Silverlake section of Los Angeles, completed in 1962. His brother still lives there.
“The house is on the side of a hill, and we took into account the view of the lake,” Wright said, speaking of the building’s relationship to its site in a way that might make his grandfather proud. “One of the things I did in the living room is, the 4-by-8-inch wood columns that support the roof, I used them to frame the view, like a painting or a shoji screen.
“The base is concrete block sandblasted to reveal the colors of the aggregate, above that is brushed plywood, and the house has a flat gravel roof with exposed beam ends and deep wood fascia with a serrated edge on the bottom that accentuates patterns of light and shadow on the walls.”
The new developments in Riverside County also carry forward his grandfather’s philosophies of “organic” architecture.
In this case, Johns, the developer, explains, “organic” means laying out the development according to the terrain, instead of grading the land flat for easy, economical construction.
Johns’ company is in the business of getting raw land ready for development, shepherding it through the lengthy permit process. At this point, Taliesin Architects and Wright have been hired to prepare development master plans, not to design houses, but Johns hopes some of the home builders who buy finished land from him will hire the Wrightians to design houses. Johns said construction of new homes won’t start until at least 1994.
But inevitably, a conversation with Wright turns back to the Wright legacy that has come before him.
In some famous families, sons and daughters of legendary figures attempt to make a clean break from the family, or from family careers, to carve out separate identities. Eric Wright, however, says he never felt a desire to distance himself from the family legacy.
For a brief time as a teen-ager, Wright thought he wanted to go into farming. He grew up in a home on Doheny Drive in Hollywood, when the area was mostly bean fields and the family kept all manner of farm animals. His father didn’t encourage any designs on a career as an architect.
“I shied away from it at first,” he recalled. “I heard horror stories at the dinner table about the headaches of dealing with contractors.
“But at 15, I began spending summers at Taliesin (his grandfather’s hands-on architectural school and estate in Wisconsin). In the evenings, I would talk with the apprentices, and I could see the really wonderful, stimulating work that architecture was in creating space. I always felt that Taliesin was the right way to learn architecture, by the apprentice method rather than academic study.”
He worked with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin from 1948 until 1956, when his grandfather was “probably doing more work than at any time in his life.” Then he went to work for his father in Los Angeles.
Frank Lloyd Wright has been the most important American architect of the 20th Century, yet many of his ideas were never fully appreciated during his lifetime.
It is a testament to Wright’s genius that companies like the Inland Group are looking to his disciples, including his grandson, for better planning solutions, 33 years after his death.
“I think the 1990s are just beginning to catch up with what he was talking about,” Eric Wright says. “We’re all very interested in working with nature, working with the land. Ecology is part of our vocabulary now. He was talking about that in the 1930s. Also his engineering. He was always working with the latest materials. He was interested in using new technology, but he always said the technology should be the servant of man, not man the servant of technology.”
Tonight’s lecture at Sherwood Auditorium, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla, is being presented in conjunction with the “San Diego Lost & Found,” an exhibit on historic preservation produced by museum studies students at Mesa College. Portions of the show are on display at the Mesa College Art Gallery, through Nov. 11, and the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla, 1008 Wall St., through Nov. 21. Tickets for tonight’s lecture are $10. Call 627-2878 for more information.
