From Issue 66:
Robie House: Startling To This Day
Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1910 Robie House, the quintessential Prairie Style home, is widely regarded as an entirely indigenous American design and a precursor to architectural modernism both in this country and in Europe. In this, the building’s centennial year, the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust is releasing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, an insightful new photographic exploration of the Robie House’s history and architectural significance.
In all-new full-color photography, architectural photographer Tim Long captures the building’s exterior forms, important interior spaces (which, to architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright, are “startling to this day”), art glass, decorative details such as light fixtures and wood grilles, and extant furniture designed for the house. Historical photographs convey Wright’s vision of a total environment.
“The distinctly layered elements of the house seem to disassemble and reassemble as though viewed through a kaleidoscope instead of a camera,” says Long about the experience of photographing the building. His remark echoes the 1918 assessment by Dutch architect J.J.P. Oud in the then-new journal De Stijl:
“In the Robie house we see a new departure from architectural design as we have previously known it. The embellishment of the building (which here in Holland is nearly always attempted by the secondary means of detail, or ornament) is here achieved by primary means: the effect of the masses themselves. Instead of a stable and rigid compactness of the various parts, Wright detaches the masses from the whole and rearranges their composition. … In this way Wright has created a new ‘plastic’ architecture. His masses slide back and forth and left and right. This movement … opens up entirely new aesthetic possibilities for architecture.” (H. Allen Brooks, Writings on Wright, MIT Press, 1983)
Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger of The New Yorker provides a foreword capturing the essence of Wright’s philosophy as expressed in the house. Interpretive commentary on the photographs has been written by Cheryl Bachand, Zarine Weil and Brian Reis, who are intimately involved in the restoration and presentation of the historic site as staff members at the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust, which operates the Robie House and Wright’s own first home and studio in Oak Park as public historic architecture museums. More information on the many restoration, preservation and education programs of the Trust can be found at gowright.org.
Published by Marquand Books, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House (48 pp., $19.95) is expected to be released in July. It will be available through shopwright.org and at the Preservation Trust museum shops.
Pierpont Inn Celebrates 100 Years
Celebrating 100 years in September, the Craftsman-era Pierpont Inn & Spa is one of the oldest operating hotels in California. Set atop a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Ventura, some 50 miles north of Los Angeles, the inn was commissioned by the City of Ventura and developed in 1910 by Josephine Pierpont-Ginn of Ojai to serve as a weekend retreat for Angelenos and a place of rest and relaxation for travelers driving up and down the California coast.
To design the bungalow-style inn, Josephine turned to Sumner P. Hunt, whose other significant buildings in Southern Cali- fornia included Charles Fletcher Lummis’s Pueblo-style home and Southwest Museum northeast of Los Angeles, the Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles and the Raymond Hotel in Pasadena.
Josephine’s son Austen Pierpont, an architect, managed the inn for its first decade and a half, expanding it in 1925 by adding two English Tudor cottages in a lush garden setting. After he moved on, the inn changed hands several times and fell into disrepair until it was bought in 1928 by Mrs. Mattie Vickers Gleichmann, who, after injury forced her husband, professional baseball player Gus Gleichmann, to leave the sport, borrowed $80,000 from her father, a prominent Ventura farmer, to purchase and renovate the inn. It reopened in 1929 as a family operation, with her husband, mother, sister, brother-in-law and children all working on and around the property, and it remained in the Vickers family to recently.
Colorful History
In its early years the inn became a retreat (and refuge) for Hollywood celebrities and something of a hideout for those who were involved in scandals and wanted to disappear from the public eye for a time. The social elite and Hollywood royalty could depend on the staff’s hospitality and privacy, a tradition that remains intact today.
In 1933, Ventura attorney Earle Stanley Gardner, whose office was down the road, featured the inn in a novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, in which he introduced the character of defense lawyer Perry Mason. The novel’s success launched Gardner on a new career.
In 1938, after Gus Gleichmann was killed in an automobile accident, Mattie and her family decided to continue operating the inn without him. The inn had a role during World War II as a military installation, with searchlights scanning the ocean and gunnery batteries installed on the bluff below.
The Gleichmanns’ son Ted, who served as an Army Air Force flight instructor during the war, became the inn’s general manager when he returned from duty. Over the next decade he modernized and expanded the facilities, adding an east wing with 12 fireplace guestrooms in 1954 and later the Bluff House and west wing to bring the total number of rooms to 72.
In addition to his duties at the inn, Ted was a championship-winning amateur golfer. (He won the 1963 PGA Bing Invitational Tournament—now known as the AT&T Pebble Beach Golf Tournament.) His success in the golf world attracted many of his famous social contacts to the inn.
In 1976, Mattie’s sister’s grandsons Spencer and Scott Garrett leased the then-vacant parcel of land adjacent to the inn to build one of the nation’s first multipurpose athletic facilities, the Pierpont Racquet Club. After Mattie’s death in 1996 at the age of 100, the inn was eventually sold to the Garretts, who remained committed to the inn’s architectural history and integrity.
The site’s other historic properties—the Vickers Estate, which dates from the mid-’30s, and Austen Pierpont’s two English Tudor cottages—have also been restored. The inn was designated as Landmark No. 80 by the City of Ventura in 1993 and in 2002 was granted national historic status by Historic Hotels of America, a marketing organization in Washington, D.C., run by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
“The Pierpont Inn is an amazing treasure, and we have worked very hard to preserve its rich heritage,” says general manager Miller Vargas. “We are living history here every day and are thrilled to serve as caretakers of this lovely inn and to celebrate its centennial with the community.”
For more information on the hotel and the centennial, visit pierpontinn.com.
Recent Comments