Is Frank Lloyd Wright furniture really so uncomfortable? You can find out for yourself by visiting the home of Seymour H. Persky.
Guests are encouraged to pull up a chair, sit down at the Wright dining table and intimately experience pieces that normally could be viewed only behind a rope at a museum.
Persky is considered to have the foremost private collection of Chicago-related architectural artifacts in the country, according to Tim Samuelson, curator of architecture and design at the Chicago Historical Society and a longtime adviser to Persky on his collections. About 150 acquisitions are on display in Persky’s 4,200-square-foot loftlike apartment in River North.
Always a great admirer of history, Persky began his academic career wanting to be a history teacher. “Archeology, the history of architecture, is really tangible history,” explains Persky, a lawyer and real estate investor. “It is the only thing that is left of a culture after the culture has vanished.”
Of particular interest to this lifelong Chicagoan is the period after the Chicago Fire when architectural creativity flourished. He calls it “La Belle Epoque.”
“Chicago was a young, upstart city,” explains Samuelson. “It was a city that didn’t have a consensus of how things should look or be done. Architects came and many of them had very romantic and unconventional ideas about architecture being vital and reflecting its time and having an emotional power rather than just style.
“Architects like Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright created buildings so that anyone who sees them can get an emotional reaction and react to them like you see a beautiful sunrise or sunset or a tree. There’s a continuity of the integrity of this passion that went through the whole building down to its smallest details and those details are the things that are so seductive,” says Samuelson.
Persky began collecting in the early 1960s. The Chicago Stock Exchange Building was being renovated, and the building management was tearing out the beautiful elevator grilles designed by Louis Sullivan. Seeing the janitor carting them off, Persky asked what was happening to them. After being told they were being thrown away, Persky tore two $100 bills in half, gave two halves to the janitor and told him he would receive the other two halves when he delivered the elevator grilles to his home.
Today, those grilles stand across the glass wall of his dining room that opens onto a terrace and against two interior walls of his living room. Samuelson likens them to “lace in scrap metal; they are delicate, yet strong, and they are animated.”
Subsequent purchases came through more conventional channels. Persky attended auctions over the years, mostly in the Midwest, and built a reputation. Often people contacted him proposing a sale.
Two drawings by Wright bought at auction hang prominently in the dining room. Dated 1925, these are architectural renderings of a building intended for but never built at Michigan Avenue and Pearson Street. The developer, an eccentric named Albert Johnson, envisioned an innovative building whose design has a timeless quality.
To the left stands a desk from the Coonley House in Riverside and a chair from Unity Temple in Oak Park, both by Wright. Above is a fragment from Wright’s Dana-Thomas House in Springfield.
Three fragments from balusters from the Roloson Row Houses, on South Calumet Avenue in Chicago, one of Wright’s first jobs after leaving Louis Sullivan’s office, stand on the floor.
Among the pieces hanging on the dining room wall opposite the windows is a piece of wooden cabinetry, the only existing fragment of the Potter Palmer mansion designed by the architectural firm of Cobb & Frost. Nearby is a detail of a carved wood bracket taken from the cafe in the Wainwright building in downtown St. Louis, considered to be one of Sullivan’s premier buildings because in celebrating the building’s height rather than disguising it, it marked a turning point in American architecture.
Along the same wall are six copper-plated, cast-iron balusters from the Chicago Stock Exchange Building installed to re-create the continuity that they had in the building. To the right is an example of Sullivan ornamentation on loan from Samuelson. The rare fragment is a plaster panel from a doorway that once separated the lobby and the reading room in the Auditorium Hotel, a building now occupied by Roosevelt University. A glass-top dining table by Le Corbusier is surrounded by black leather chairs by Mies van der Rohe.
These rooms are not enjoyed by Perksy alone. Each year he hosts seven or eight fundraisers or receptions in his home for charitable organizations. Usually Persky and Samuelson conduct the tours of the collection.
One of the most dramatic settings in Persky’s home is the living room, featuring a fireplace set in the middle of what was originally a large pool. Furniture includes a red leather chaise and several Barcelona chairs by Mies, a chair from the Dana-Thomas House, two peacock chairs from the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo by Wright and two chairs by Le Corbusier.
A complete dining room set from the Martin House in Oak Park offers a good example of Wright’s tall-back chairs. Because the rooms in Wright’s houses flowed into one another and he felt so strongly about the idea of family dining together as a very personal experience, Wright designed dining chairs with tall backs that define a very intimate space, Samuelson explains. He points out that when dining, one hits the chair back only at the seat, making these perfectly comfortable for the job.
Eight Wright windows hang along the glass wall on the north. One from the B. Harley Bradley House in Kankakee is considered to be a seminal piece in Wright’s development of geometric abstractions of nature for his window designs, according to Samuelson.
A nearby triptych comes from the same house. Although its importance is as an ensemble, the auction house offered it one piece at a time. The transom sold first and Persky readily bought it. One of the bottom windows came next, but an absentee bidder drove the price so high that Persky passed it up. The same happened with the other bottom piece. Several years later the owner of the two lower pieces put them up for sale and Persky was able to bid on them again. He got them for far less than he originally intended to pay and the person who owned them “took a terrific beating.” It was only then that he found out he had been bidding against the singer and actress Barbra Streisand.
A plaster sculpture by Alfonso Iannelli is mounted on the wall composed of rock aggregate behind the fireplace. Commissioned for the entrance of the Woodbury County Courthouse in Sioux City, Iowa, this was to have been one of two panels based on the 10 Commandments. One was to have been “Order” and the other called “Disorder.” While working on the image for “Thou Shall Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Wife” for “Disorder,” Iannelli decided to depict a naked woman strutting with her hands back in her hair rather than the approved design of a cloaked figure who is shamefully looking away, says Samuelson. Iannelli’s work was rejected and thought lost until an Iowa woman contacted Persky years later.
Although Persky is now a highly respected collector, he and his early acquisitions were considered eccentric. Perhaps this visionary had some of the same romantic and unconventional ideas of the architects he so admires.
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RESOURCES:
Pg. 30: Living room vignette: Barcelona chairs by Mies van der Rohe and sculpture by Alfonso Iannelli–personal collection.
Pg. 31: Terrace vignette: Ornamentation by Louis Sullivan and table and chairs–personal collection.
Pg. 32: Living room vignette: Dining set and stained-glass windows by Frank Lloyd Wright and screen by John Lloyd Wright–personal collection.
Pg. 33: Living room vignette: Two Peacock chairs by Frank Lloyd Wright and elevator grilles by Louis Sullivan–personal collection.
Pg. 34: Sitting room vignette: Sprite by Frank Lloyd Wright, iron railing from Auditorium Theatre, sculpture by Alfonso Iannelli, cardboard maquettes of entries in Tribune Tower competition, stencil by Louis Sullivan, light fixture from the Francis W. Little House in Peoria by Frank Lloyd Wright–personal collection.
Pg. 36: Terrace vignette: “Welcome” by Abbott Pattison–personal collection.
Pg. 42: Living room vignette: Reclining chair and hammered copper work, both by Frank Lloyd Wright–personal collection.
