“Comment on 'The Early Drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright Reconsidered.'”

AboutCurtis Besinger, a former member of the Taliesin Fellowship, writes a detailed rebuttal to Eileen Michels's JSAH article questioning whether Frank Lloyd Wright was truly a "gifted draftsman" when Louis Sullivan hired him in the 1880s. Besinger argues Michels conflates the specific skill of rendered perspective drawing with the broader practice of architectural drafting, and defends the authenticity and dating of a fragmentary pencil drawing of ornament — identified as Wright's design for a bronze newel post — that Michels had rejected as inconsistent with the Auditorium Building's 1885–87 design period. Drawing on his own professional and Taliesin experience, Besinger reconstructs the office practices of Sullivan's era: the sequence of design sketches, finish drawings, and craftsman-directed ornamental detail drawings; the likelihood that Auditorium ornament drawings continued to be produced into 1889–90, citing a dated Sullivan sketch for a Banquet Hall capital; and the role of the 1885 Chicago Opera Festival Auditorium as a precedent Wright could have observed. He also addresses the drawings' mixed pencil techniques and multiple-hand authorship as ordinary studio practice rather than anomalies. Besinger closes by arguing that Wright's autobiography should be read as a poetic, subjectively true account of his hiring rather than a factual record, and proposes a broader scholarly study of the historical role of architectural drawing itself.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28197210%2931%3A3%3C216%3ACO%22EDO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J