Frank Lloyd Wright and San Francisco

The San Francisco Bay Area is not a location typically associated with architect Frank Lloyd Wright and there is no stylistic commonality to his work there, but, as Turner (Campus: An American Planning Tradition) shows in this astute architectural study (based on a class he taught for many years at Stanford University), the area is host to a fascinating cross-section of Wright’s work and was the focus of an especially intriguing set of unbuilt projects. The Hanna House, one of Wright’s personal favorites, was a triumph of hexagonal planning; the V.C. Morris shop is a remarkable exercise in minimal commercial monumentalism; the Marin County Civic Center, his largest work ever, would merit a book all to itself. His incomplete projects for the area are possibly even more interesting: several residential projects were proposed for dramatically sloped sites, turning Wright to unusually vertical solutions that were unfortunately too expensive to build. A bridge featuring an elevated park center was naturally too appealing for reality. Other proposals included a massive office building and more novel commissions: a funeral parlor and a wedding chapel. “Only a city as beautiful as this can survive what you’re doing to it,” Wright once said in criticism of San Francisco’s “shanty building” structures, and the history of his efforts to stem this tide in San Francisco is a strong tale. Illus. (Nov.)