A Note From Tom Fontana To Buffalo Rising Readers:
On September 6, 2006, we broke ground for the Frank Lloyd Wright Boathouse, which will be named in honor of my parents, Charlie and Marie.
My dad dedicated much of his life to the sport of rowing internationally and to the West Side Rowing Club in Buffalo. My mom made it possible for Dad to devote hours of sportsmanship, caring and encouragement to thousands of young oarsmen for over forty years.
In 1905, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a rowing boathouse for a site in Madison, Wisconsin, but the project was never built. A group of rowing and architecture enthusiasts in Buffalo have acquired the plans, negotiated a land deal and are currently raising the funds to build this unique structure on the Black Rock Canal.
The design of the boathouse is classic Frank Lloyd Wright, featuring large vertical piers supporting horizontal planes, design elements that are seen in his other Buffalo works, including the Larkin Building and the Martin House. In fact, Wright identified the boathouse as one of his best designs and included it in the Wasmuth Portfolio (the compendium of Wright’s “best early works”) first published in Berlin in 1910. Wright also included the building in his 1930/1931 touring exhibition featuring eight of his best designs. The boathouse’s addition to other Western New York Frank Lloyd Wright buildings will give the local economy a much needed boost, helping to attract tourists.
The boathouse also meshes perfectly with the waterfront development plans of my alma mater, Buffalo State College. These plans include a home for the school’s Great Lakes Research Center and a community boat building school. This development will turn a piece of prime, currently underutilized waterfront property into a wonderful resource for both the residents of Buffalo and environmental studies.
Last, but certainly not least, the boathouse will provide much needed space for the West Side Rowing Club, an important community asset, and the USA’s largest rowing club. WSRC has been providing Buffalo / Niagara access to the sport of rowing for 90 years, offering the city’s youth an opportunity to participate in great amateur sport. A remarkable success story, the current boathouse is filled to capacity.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Boathouse is a very important project for the future of Buffalo. The non-profit corporation has raised $4.86 million, or 90%, of the projected $5.4 million cost of this project. Your gift would help us meet a $200,000 Challenge Grant from M&T Bank. For every $3 we raise, the bank will donate $1, up to $200,000. Any amount from you is welcome!
Just imagine a building that was already famous before it was built on the gateway to a great city.
Sincerely,
Tom Fontana
For information on how you or your company can help, please send us an email.
Ugh! Get a great architect from our time period to design something new and orginial!!!!!
This letter is so much about nostalgia because thats such a large part of what the architecture is about. The architecture always relects something about the people that make it happen. What should a boathouse designed for Buffalonians in 2006 look like? It should look exactly like a boathouse designed for people in 1905 I guess. If architecture always relects something about the people that make it happen, this building reflects a community frozen in time or desperate to turn back the clock.
Whatever David. We'll gladly take the Tom Fontanas and the Bashar Issas. If you don't see the promise that both factions offer then it was your brain that was frozen by the ice storm. If you're so desperate to get out of the clutches of Buffalo's past then move down south where you can happily live in prefab cookie cutter cities. Don't forget to knock down the Larkin Building before you go. It's a dumb old building that wreaks of the past too, right?
The Larkin Building was demolished in 1950.
The Larkin Building expressed the needs and spirit of its time(1906). The demolition of the building was a tragic event that also reflected the needs and spirit of its time(1950).
Architecture is a special medium that allows us as a community to impress our values, philosophy and spirit onto our cities in a way that can last for centuries. By building fake old buildings, It seems to say that we(Buffalonians in 2006) have nothing in the way of new ideas or philosophy to contribute. I suppose then we can just stop trying now.
Also, Buffalo will never be a cookie cutter city if we can get designers that are alive to design for the UNIQUE and SPECIFIC needs of Buffalonians in 2006 and not dead designs for Madisonians in 1905!
on the contrary david, it does NOT say that Buffalo is frozen in time and has nothing new to contribute.
on the contrary david ever since the 1950s highway and urban renewal started, 1960s started the national preservation movement after the demolition of Penn Station in NYC the entire nation is re-examining and the cultural shocks of disposable and transient society......WE AS A NATION HAVE BEEN RE-EXAMINING OUR VALUES.
Buffalo stands besides cities such as Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, Montreal and others that have re-examined their community values eliminating highways from the urban core, expanding mass transit, rebuilding neighborhoods, focussing on families, schools and safe communities.
Your absolutely wrong that architecture is a museum reflecting its time. That is a snobbish and elitist myopia. Kittinger still makes furniture designed from the 18th and 19th century and no one thinks less of someone who period furniture in their home that isnt an antique and the same goes for art and sculpture and the other design fields.
The key to design is not its age but the quality of the design. People can appreciate and desire an Sullivan, Richardson, EB Green, Saarinen, Wright just as easily as they can appreciate and desire an IM Pei or a Calatrava or a Johnson. Good design is good design.
That is why people can buy Stickly Mission Furniture or Kittinger Furniture and be incredibly happy with it.
That is why people can by a copy of Monet or Rembrandt and be incredibly happy with it.
A good quality design made with good quality materials is TIMELESS and CAN CONTRIBUTE TO THE OWNER AND THE COMMUNITY WHETHER IT IS NEW or 100 years old.
Dont be an elitist snob!
My only issue with this amazing project is that it's a bit impractical... only holds a very small number of boats, when room for many is needed. It does not negate the need for the current boathouse. Other than that, it's damned cool. Maybe they can knock down the old boathouse and get the same architect who did the visitor's center to do a really modern on on the site of the current boat house!
There are brilliant painters, sculptors, architects, composers, musicians, poets, etc entering the universities each year - and their genius is being brainwashed right out of them by mediocre no-talents & their Gropius, machine-for-living, form-follows-fiasco, Brutalist, Bauhaus bulls**t.
If another Mozart came along today, he/she would be made to write atonal, melody-free crap to please the talentless hack acting as Perfesser. I'm not even a fan of Wright, but this boathouse beats 99% of the slop being cranked-out today.
The Larkin Administration Building was demolished. The Larkin Building is 98% occupied and can be found on Essex.
Sorry, my point is, the reason that the existing Larkin Building is so successful is in great part due to the history that comes along with it. Ask any business that opts to move in and they will say that was part of the draw. When I bring friends in from out of town and show them the Larkin Building they are blown away by the project. The boathouse will do the same thing. I bet if you asked anyone at the West Side Rowing Club if we would wee any new building at all if it were not for FLW they would tell you GOOD LUCK. So why look a gift horse in the mouth?
From this time forward, anytime we build a building, let's make it great. If it is a FLW-designed building, I guess you can't get anything greater than that.
The trendy architect of today -- and I don't care who it is -- will have a lot to prove to be even in the same hemisphere as Wright. You have to have your head firmly wedged in a shady spot not to realize the critcal mass of architectural treasures we will have, both restored, partially rebuilt and built anew from the master's blueprints. It will be a cultural tourist MAGNET.
The Darwin Martin complex, with the Barton House and Gardener's Cottage, Graycliff, the Blue Sky Mortuary, the Boathouse, and maybe someday a publicly accessible Heath House and Tillinghast house. The only thing missing is a rebuilt Larkin Administration Building -- not the exquisite adaptive re-use of the Larkin Factory by Howard Zemsky and partners.
Thank God we have Zemsky's and Lipsey's and others who are truly visionary and willing to put their money where their mouth is.
David, whomever you are, you are showing yourself to be a Hall of Fame nimrod.
steve, whomever you are
You comment was very rude. Go and visit the Blue Sky mosoleum. Inspect it. Touch it. Spend some time with it. Do you really consider that to be a great building just because some of it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright? It is a cheap attempt by Forest Lawn to get alot of money from crazed FLW fans. Did FLW really design the mosoleum with his own quote engraved into the side of it? I think this building is a f*cking joke!
Architecture can be a marketing tool, but don't get lost in that. There is more to architecture. Whether you like Blue Sky or not, "cheap gimmick" is part of its story now and part of the experience. The Darwin Martin house and the Larkin Building were not cheap gimmicks. If you want to discuss this in terms of marketing, you should be aware of the messages that it sends. Do a simple search of articles in Journals and newspapers that discuss this project. The most thorough articles describe the architourism or "cheap gimmick" angle.
-FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT STAYS BUSY IN BUFFALO, [ny times]
http://www.fredbernstein.com/articles/display.asp?id=71
-DOES A FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT REVIVAL HONOR OR BETRAY HIM?, Change of Plans [the new republic]
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=online&s=yeo113004
-BUILDING WRIGHT NOW: QUESTIONING THE APPROPRIATENESS OF EXECUTING FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT'S UNBUILT PLANS [national trust online]
http://www.nationaltrust.org/magazine/archives/arch_story/060206.htm