"Like a Drama of Sophocles"

"The L.A. houses are also austere enough to be off-putting. Yet what historians and critics have generally failed to see is that they were inscrutable and even crypt-like not by accident but by design. They were places for Wright to bury the grief he’d been shouldering for nearly a decade, since Mamah Borthwick, the woman he’d abandoned his family and career for, was brutally murdered in 1914."

On the 150th birthday of Frank Lloyd Wright, Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times argues that "the five Los Angeles houses Wright produced in the early 1920s remain underappreciated and largely misunderstood."

And Josh Kramer at The Atlantic especially advocates for the Ennis House.

"Timeless, Joy-Giving, Life-Giving Free Spaces to Fulfill Ideally Man's Needs"

"The world may be catching up to the iconoclastic vision of the man who, when asked what he thought of the metropolis that he made his home, said he wanted to roll a giant boulder down Mulholland Drive. If only Lautner had been given the chance to sculpt the cityscape, instead of merely erect rare gems. The man who designed the Googie Coffee Shop — the origin of the name for a whole style of design—could even make roadside vernacular sing."

Evelyn McDonnell in the LA Weekly marks the centennial of architect John Lautner's birth.

A Blank Canvas

"In a 1959 New Yorker review of the recently opened Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lewis Mumford admired Frank Lloyd Wright's invention but deplored the building's many deficiencies as a place to exhibit art: the distracting ramp, the sloping walls, the lack of conventional galleries. He concluded that perhaps the best solution would be to turn 'Wright's monumental and ultimately mischievous failure' into a museum of architecture. Last month, the Guggenheim did something better. As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, for a solo show by a young European performance artist, Tino Sehgal, it left the rotunda empty. The stark space was a revelation."

Witold Rybczynski in Slate explores an empty Guggenheim Museum.

Architects May Come and Architects May Go

"The New York City Buildings Department, leery of unconventional designs, would probably have nixed the project were it not for Robert Moses, the city's master builder and destroyer. Moses hated modern art and didn't like Wright's design, either. But the two men were distant cousins, so out of friendship Moses rammed through the application, telling the buildings commissioner, 'Damn it, get a permit for Frank, I don't care how many laws you have to break.'"

Fred Kaplan in Slate marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

"Lovers of the Beautiful"

"'My grandfather designed homes to be occupied by people,' he said in a statement to The Times. 'His homes are works of art. He created the space, but the space becomes a creative force and uplifts when it is lived in every day.'"

Martha Groves in the Los Angeles Times reports that the 1924 Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Ennis House is up for sale.

So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright

Slate notes the architect's birthday with a photo slideshow.