After 50 Years, a Frank Lloyd Wright Finally Got Built. Then It Spawned a Sibling.
Two friends in Minnesota brought unused drawings to life before creating a companion home with a rhyming roof and material palette.
Two friends in Minnesota brought unused drawings to life before creating a companion home with a rhyming roof and material palette.
Over the course of a seven-decade career and up until his death in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright was remarkably prolific. He designed more than 1,100 structures, from museums, office towers, hotels, and churches to houses of all sizes and configurations. Not all were realized, but some served as templates for later designs in which the architect refined and adapted themes that sparked his seemingly limitless curiosity.
Bear Run, realized by architect David Uppgren in Marine on St. Croix, Minneapolis, is based on two nearly identical Frank Lloyd Wright designs that were never built: a 1948 plan for the architect’s sister and drawings of a cottage for his friends from 1958.
Photo by Tommy O'Brien Photography
One such project was a 1958 guest house that Wright planned for his friends and clients Don and Virginia Lovness in Stillwater, Minnesota. With its triangulated roof and sharply angled overhang projecting out from one side—Wright had a facility for acute geometries—the drawings for the Lovnesses’ Cottage C were nearly identical to the unbuilt summer home he’d designed a decade before at Taliesin for his youngest sister, Maginel Wright Barney.
Like his 1948 plan for Maginel, the Minnesota home also demonstrated Wright’s penchant for exploring new ideas, says architect Tim Quigley, the co-author of a monograph on the architectural career of Wright’s chief draftsman, John Howe, and a board member of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.
The home’s exterior limestone blocks wrap into its entrance, where Wright’s signature compression technique is in play. The compact space "releases" into a larger, more open space.
Photo by Tommy O'Brien Photography
"Why was Wright playing with extreme geometries in 1948? He was always restless from a design standpoint," Quigley says. "He tried to get everything he ever designed built, and time and again, he designed many a house type that became the basis of subsequent, related designs."
Maginel’s summer retreat and Cottage C might have existed only on paper, but after Don’s death, Virginia gifted working drawings to a longtime friend, done by Taliesin Associated Architects, a firm founded by Wright apprentices. And that friend had just the spot for it: a lakeside site he co-owned in Marine on St. Croix, northeast of Minneapolis. Working with architect David Uppgren, in 2006, the owners realized the single-story design, but expanded it to include a lower level that opens out to the lake. Virginia’s friend now lives there full-time.
The owners’ dogs, Yoshi and Bear, rest in the living room, where a monumental fireplace anchors the house. "That craggy hunk of stone above the fireplace is something you see at Taliesin," says Tim Quigley, co-author of a book on Wright’s chief draftsman, John Howe, and a member of the board of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.
Courtesy Imprint Architecture + Design
See the full story on Dwell.com: After 50 Years, a Frank Lloyd Wright Finally Got Built. Then It Spawned a Sibling.
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