This weekend we learned of the impending auction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1948 Kenneth Laurent House, a home Wright built for a wheel-chair bound veteran. Continue.

Wright created a graceful, one-story ellipse-shaped home for Laurent and his wife, who became close friends to the architect. It is said that the home was one of Wright’s personal favorites – indeed, the curvilinear plan reappears frequently in his later work.

The auction includes all of the FLW-designed furnishings, among them chairs, tables, lights, and a wrought-iron fireplace screen. It was not unusual for Wright to have designed the home as a gesamtkunstwerk, but it is unusual that such a home would be for sale with its original furnishings intact.

The auction house estimates the home’s value at $500,000-$700,000. The auction will take place on December 15 in Chicago, and will be brokered by the same house that sold Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #21 in 2006, says Art Daily.

We’d like to find out a bit more about how Wright designed the home to the specifications of a wheelchair-bound owner, before the era of ADA code – we wonder if he conducted tests of the ellipse plan, or if it was an instinctual decision on the part of the young architect, intent on experimenting with variations on an open plan?

by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

posted in Heritage Uncategorized news

tagged Architecture, auction, famous architecture, Frank Llord Wright, history, wheel chair

more articles by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan