It’s called the shame factor.
For years, preservationists have wielded it like a sledgehammer in their attempts to force real estate developers and public officials to save treasured buildings.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
But last Thursday, when the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy announced that an endangered Wright house in west suburban Lisle would be moved to Johnstown, Pa., it was apparent that the shame factor has taken on new power.
It has been 31 years since the last Wright-designed structure was demolished (the Arthur Munkwitz Apartments in Milwaukee, torn down in 1973). No one, it seems, wants to be the first to break that streak.
The prospect of all the bad publicity — television crews taping as a bulldozer smashes a Wright house to splinters, reporters sticking a microphone in a developer’s face and asking, “Why are you doing this?” — is not pleasant to contemplate.
“That’s the real story,” acknowledged Todd Golin, the president of DANIC Custom Homes of Arlington Heights, which extended its Feb. 15 deadline for the conservancy to find someone who would move the house.
The longer the streak goes on, the more effective the shame factor becomes.
Completing a triple play
Why does Johnstown, Pa., want to turn the Wright house into an education center for 20th Century art and architecture?
For the same reason that a declining Spanish port city called Bilbao decided to back the building of Frank Gehry’s striking Guggenheim Museum of 1997: It is looking for a magnet to draw tourists.
Johnstown (pop: 23,906) is about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh. It is perhaps best known for being struck by an 1889 flood that killed more than 2,200 people.
But now civic leaders there have shrewdly decided to ride the current wave of architectural tourism. The idea is to lure tourists who already are coming by the thousands to southwestern Pennsylvania to see Wright buildings.
Wright’s famed Fallingwater house, completed in 1935, is about 50 miles to the southwest of Johnstown. And just down the road from Fallingwater is Wright’s I.N. Hagan Residence, known as Kentuck Knob and finished in 1954.
The Lisle house, a prefab home built in 1957, “completes a trinity of Frank Lloyd Wright houses in this area,” said Tim Baacke, the Johnstown high school teacher and Wright buff who helped arrange the deal to move the Lisle house to Johnstown.
“We thought that this house really provided a unique opportunity to see three Wright houses all within an hour’s drive.”
Hoboken tribute to 9/11
Chicago architect Jeanne Gang is on one of four teams that have been selected as finalists to design a Sept. 11 memorial for the city of Hoboken, N.J.
More than 50 residents of the northern New Jersey city, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, died on Sept. 11, 2001.
Called the FLOW Group, Gang’s team includes an artist, a Hoboken resident who is an engineer, an architectural lighting designer and an aeronautical engineer who has designed America’s Cup sails.
The centerpiece of the team’s proposal is a tall, wind-activated structure that would be supported by five thin, bending columns. A round netlike material, gossamer light, would be set atop the columns. It would move with the wind, its shape symbolizing the community that has developed in the wake of the terrorist attacks, Gang said Friday.
Like the designs by the other finalists, the structure would bid visitors to gaze toward lower Manhattan, where the World Trade Center once stood.
Also among the finalists is a team of Frederic Schwartz, a leader of the THINK team that was a co-finalist in the competition for a master plan at ground zero, and Brian Tolle, designer of the Irish Hunger Memorial near the World Trade Center.
The finalists were announced last Thursday. A winner is expected to be named in April.
